


Lost Light

by Icebreather



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Kind of angsty, Now very AU, Seriously incredibly slow burn, Slow Burn, battling dragons, mostly TV canon compliant, otp, very slow burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-07-10 20:18:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 28
Words: 58,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15956759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icebreather/pseuds/Icebreather
Summary: Begins directly after the season 7 finale: Jaime rides North to keep his vow, and perhaps be near a certain blue-eyed wench.  These two have a lot to overcome, but the possibility of redemption and the makings of real love might matter more than the end of the world as they know it.





	1. Leaving King's Landing

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first-ever GOT fanfic (and first fanfic, period, in many years). Plot is quite unoriginal but I hope you enjoy my take on it. Constructive criticism is appreciated!

The camps of the slower of the North-bound groups leaving King’s Landing clustered closely together, for safety, and more closely still, for warmth. Northern men-at-arms, and a few knights, did so in the wake of the Dothraki who were under orders to ride hard for Winterfell. The northerners didn’t tarry, but none of their horses could match those of the Dothraki for speed. On the second night out from the city Podrick and Lady Brienne sat before their fire, Pod hunching in the cold. One of the Stark men-at-arms accompanying them had set up to take the first watch. The other was already asleep in his bedroll. The Lady swallowed her third mouthful of tea and then of a sudden stilled, her hand dropping to Oathkeeper. Pod straightened without knowing what she was sensing. Then off in the darkness he heard a murmur of voices, short and sharp, with the rustle of people approaching.

Standing, the Maid of Tarth stared in the direction of those sounds. Pod hadn’t been seated, but he tensed: any of the Stark company who needed to speak with them on a non-emergent basis could have done so at any point in the day’s ride from King’s Landing.

“Got any extra for a reformed Queensguard?” The voice from the darkness was unexpected, refined of accent, richly tenor, but with a raw undertone and an uncertainty that trailed at the end. Pod stood in astonishment as Jaime Lannister stepped out of the night’s murky gloom into the warm fire-cast light, their watchman behind him with a dagger out, though held down at his side. Pod heard Lady Brienne’s quick intake of breath. He saw her fingers lift from the sword, but then hover there in a hesitation that he found entirely unlike her. The sleeping man-at-arms was no longer asleep; everyone was on their feet, hands hovering at sides, tense. Words from Bronn ringing in his head, Pod spoke hurriedly, before the Lady had a chance to refuse guest-rights to the Kingslayer.

“We do. Lady Stark has well-supplied us for this journey.”

The men were protesting. Pod glanced to them.

“We’re allies now, aren’t we? We’re going to be fighting on the same side.”

Something in Ser Jaime’s face shifted. Lady Brienne’s shoulders squared, as if in response. Pod didn’t know why. But of course, allies or not, the two armies surely wouldn’t be sharing fires, and no way was the Southern one ready this quickly to advance North, and Ser Jaime seemed entirely alone, so … “Err – what are you doing here? Ser?”

Ser Jaime stepped in closely enough that they could see his cold-reddened nose and cheeks. He took a long, slow breath, his gaze tracking all their faces but pausing on the Lady’s.

“You were right,” he offered Lady Brienne, his tone low. “This ‘great war’, as the Snow boy calls it, it’s bigger than previous oaths. Bigger than our disputes and our histories of feuding.”

She was silent, watching Ser Jaime intently, intensely. Her jaw muscles were rigid.

“I – told Cersei this. She disagreed. I –“ Ser Jaime paused, briefly, eyes flickering to Pod, to Tyl and Rostace, but then he continued, roughly – “I’ve left her.”

Lady Brienne’s hand fell from her sword. From her expression, Pod doubted she was aware of it.

“Wait – _left_ left her?” Pod blurted, shock in every awkward syllable. “Meaning, you LEFT –“

“Sit, Ser Jaime,” the Lady broke in forcefully while flicking a hard glance in Pod’s direction. “There is stew, and tea.”

For a moment Ser Jaime didn’t move. Podrick didn’t have words for the knight’s eyes as they met Lady Brienne’s. Liquid, dark. Searching, but somehow also – found.

Fanciful thoughts that Pod shoved away to consider another day. Perhaps with Bronn. He bent to rinse a used clay bowl. He heard more than saw Ser Jaime move to the fireside and seat himself.

  
The silence was thick while Ser ate up all Pod had given him. Pod watched Lady Brienne, who mostly watched Ser Jaime with a mighty frown riding her forehead. Why, he wondered, after Queen Cersei had agreed to fight on the side of life, had any conversation such as the one Ser Jaime had referenced been necessary?

Tyl and Rostace had been trading dark glances. Tyl eventually cleared his throat.

“Whatever his stated intent, Milady, this is a Lannister. Of evil reputation. It will do your standing harm if-”

Ser Jaime cut the man off, in classic Kingslayer fashion. “No fearing the Lady’s reputation. I’ll not camp here at your fire. Just letting you know I’m around. I’m heading North. I said I’d fight these dead, and I will, at the side of Starks, Snows, wildings, whatever need be. I’ll be yonder-“ he nodded off to the east, where the movements of a horse were barely visible in the dark – “at my own fire.”

He swallowed a last mouthful of stew, handed the bowl to Pod, and rose to his feet. Lady Brienne, not having uttered one more word since offering him sustenance, frowned at him and indicated a relatively level piece of ground no more than 10 feet off from their own.

“You pitch your tent there,” she directed, as if she had any right to dictate the Kingslayer’s actions, “and take the final watch of the night.”

Pod thought he was mostly successful at keeping his chortle at her commanding tone internal. Tyl and Rostace said nothing, but tightened faces and set shoulders and chins still spoke loudly. Brienne turned her glare upon them. “We have a truce,” she reminded them sharply. “If bandits, misguided Stark men, wild animals, mysterious disappearance, or _any other ill_ befalls our ally Queen Cersei’s beloved brother on our watch, the one who stood duty at that time shall pay. Dearly.” Her voice was cold and gruff, her hand on the belt of Oathkeeper. Tyl dropped his eyes. Rostace swallowed. Both nodded.

Ser Jaime’s face as he regarded the Lady was reminiscent of looks Pod had been favored to view before. It held a particular wrenching softness that honestly Pod had never seen him even try to hide. There was also something that Pod found less identifiable, but somehow … good. And new tonight, perhaps – was it respect? Not exactly.

Humility. A look as though the knight had been blessed to view something precious, something whole and true, and seen himself through that lens. Found himself lacking, but still found the other faithful and strong. Therein, perhaps, after all – yes. There was esteem in the knight’s stance, unbegrudging at that.

“Milady,” Jaime murmured, and there might have been a catch in his voice.

Lady Brienne dipped her chin, held his gaze, and gestured for him to leave.

“Goodnight, ser,” was her whole response. She watched as he paced the short distance she had indicated. Then she watched still, sipping her tea, till he had his small tent erected. As soon as he was within it, she turned and ducked into her own.

It was long before she slept. ‘Left her.’ Left her? Brienne's mind echoed Pod’s question – as in – _left_ her?

The times that the thought of Jaime and the Queen and what they were – did – together reared its ugliness to her mind, she would beat the images from her head and her emotions about them all down into a leather satchel buried in the ground in a dark corner of her soul. Now, she took her heart’s manner, so stupidly lurching in its pacing at the memory of him speaking those words, and the knot of something unidentifiable in her throat at the thought of Jaime leaving Queen Cersei, and beat those down into the leather too. Kicked dirt over the satchel. Stomped on it for good measure.

But it was still long before she slept. It made no sense that he was here. The leader of Cersei’s army should only head North at the head of that army. Him here without them meant nothing good.

In the morning’s clouded light, Brienne was visibly grumpy. As this wasn’t on its surface much different from her baseline dour demeanor, no one took much note. They were much too focused on Ser Jaime’s sudden appearance in their group. Pod heard the whispers, saw the looks, and more than one man stepping toward Jaime aggressively while camps were taken up. Lady Brienne forestalled these by sending Tyl and Rostace out to make the rounds and convey the news that Jaime was off-limits.

With camp efficiently packed, everyone was soon on the move. Jaime hung far enough back that Pod lost sight of him around the road’s curves. Ahoreseback, Pod fell into taking with Tyl and while watching their surroundings as ever for sign of trap or ambush, he saw from the corner of his eye when his Lady dropped back from their company. Not anyone’s business, he figured, and took care not to draw anyone’s attention to it.


	2. On the Road

Jaime had been expecting approach all morning, though of a more hostile variety than Brienne’s.  He realized belatedly, as on her horse the lady warrior rode into view from the curve of the road ahead of him, that he hadn’t been allowing himself to think about it.  Maybe he should have just blurted out the whole truth last night, in front of the Stark men, when the first opportunity arose.  There’d be anger from them later, that he hadn’t.  But now that Brienne’s ridiculous straw hair and strong, capable form were in view, he found his heart tilting somewhat upward from what had been its depressive slouch down into the mire and muck of his soul.  This might’ve had something to do with the couple of large men on foot who seemed to be hanging back from the other groups, walking slowly, and keeping track of him from the corners of their eyes.  Brienne’s presence might help postpone an actual attack on his person.  He let his mount pace to meet her where, upon sighting him, she’d pulled her own to a stop.  In the morning light, she looked surly.  As ever.  The familiarity of that which had been so-long absent folded over his spirit like a woolen blanket: scratchy, but warm. Dry and safe.

Safe?  Strange thought.  Surely, when death moved and acted almost as if it lived, there was nowhere left safe in all the world.

His smile was quick and, he hoped, had a snap of his old snarkiness.

“Well-met, brave knight,” he drawled.

Brienne scowled at him.  But her eyes seemed very light.

“What are you doing here, Ser Jaime?”  Her horse reached his and she turned it to face the direction they would both be traveling today.

He knew what she meant.  He hadn’t, last night, truly explained the nature of his, ah - disagreement – with his sister.  And the information that he carried to give to Jon Snow, he might well be beheaded for bringing.  Perhaps if Brienne was at his side when he delivered it, the Lady Sansa’s influence might mitigate negative reactions?

Perhaps not.

But he’d nowhere else to go.  When he left King’s Landing, he had just headed North.  No thought of doing anything else had even occurred. The fight in which the Northmen were about to engage was the only one that mattered.  If life were to have any chance, this was the one that had to be fought.  Those leading the fray had to be informed of his sister’s perfidy – to know to plan without her, and even yes, against her.  Tyrion, his brother and the only sibling left to him, would be there in the North – was on his way even now via ship.  Jaime wanted to be with whatever part of his ravaged family might be left to him. More though, he was nearly desperate to keep his word to fight.  On the side of life.

Pushed to the back of his mind was the knowledge that SHE was returning this way.  If he was going away from Cersei, he was going TO Brienne.  That made it … better, there in his mind’s corners. It wasn’t why he’d come; he’d come to fulfil his vow.  But to be, for once, on Brienne’s side?  A strange sort of warmth and softness flickered around the edges of his soul, almost as if that cold hard thing _could_ be warmed, could be comforted.

And now here he was as snow once more began, flakes drifting down, not yet enough to mute the gaze of blue eyes by turns scornful, defiant, concerned, but always strong.  Always lovely.

He looked away from them and kicked his horse to a faster walk.  Brienne’s paced alongside, the road here quite wide enough for it.

“Cersei lied,” he told Brienne baldly, gazing ahead.  His breath made puffs of white in the chill morning air.  “She’s colluded with Euron Grayjoy and won’t be sending any soldiers North.” It was enough to start with, though there were other details he’d eventually have to share – the Golden Company, Cersei’s idea of letting the Northern and Dragon forces deplete themselves against the dead threat and then take their lands for herself.  So selfish.  So insanely short-sighted.  So treacherous.  His sister.

Brienne didn’t speak for what seemed a full minute.  “No,” she bit out finally, starkly.

More snow fell about them while Brienne visibly struggled with this new reality.  No alliance with the Iron Throne.  No bolstered forces for those fighting the dead.  Her face twisted unattractively; Jaime could see her emotions insisting that these things could not be.  While in the north, Brienne must have heard more of Queen Cersei’s atrocities.  Would she be able to comprehend that the royal was capable of this level of deceit, this depth of evil?

“How can she be so ...”

Jaime waited.

“So stupid?!” Brienne shook her head sharply.

Jaime creaked out a surprised laugh.  It had been so long since he’d laughed it barely sounded like one.  He hadn’t been expecting that.  ‘Selfish’, perhaps, or ‘treacherous’. 

‘Stupid’ really did distill it down, though.

“But that’s her,” Jaime murmured.  “She’s wily, but always has been short-sighted when it comes to certain personal … goals.  She’s just – acting on those goals now on an ever-larger scale.”

Brienne grunted, her expression closing as she gazed up the road.  Perhaps that had sounded like he was finding excuses for his sister?  He hadn’t meant it so, but after a lifetime that was a difficult habit to break.  Their horses were moving, slowly walking while their riders were engaged in thought.

“Horrific,” Brienne finally asserted, her voice firm but gravelly.  She didn’t shift her gaze, but Jaime felt her attention.  Brienne had never voiced her opinion of his sister in his presence before, that he could recall.  Not until just now.  Her loyalty was such that she would not have.

Jaime’s smile faded.  When he didn’t immediately respond, the muscle at Brienne’s temple flexed (he was watching her that closely) and she pulled her mount down to a halt.  His steed followed suit.  She turned in her saddle to face him.

“Queen Cersei. is a horrific. human being.” she stated, biting each word off cleanly and distinctly, staring into Jaime’s face.  So fierce was she that he blinked and searched her expression.  Her shoulders were set in a way that made him think she was waiting for something.  It was almost a challenge.

Time was, he’d have turned the insult back on Brienne, who was not skilled with words as he was.  He’d have scornfully, mockingly come to his sister’s defense.  Here and now, the impulse did not arise.

Perhaps the man who’d have done that was dead, killed back there after all, by Cersei and her Mountain.

He didn’t speak at all.  He met Brienne’s gaze, unsure how much of his inner despair showed itself, but daring, at least, to not try to hide it.  Brienne glared as only she could, and searched his eyes – searched, perhaps, his soul.  A tide of anxiety rose within at what he knew she’d find. Dishonesty, dishonor, depravity; murder, covetousness, envy; lust, negligence, hatred - the list was long and ugly. The soul was ugly.  There was no chance she couldn’t see it all, not with those eyes. She _had_ seen it all, for such a long time.  He knew he had at some point in his life had good intentions.  Loyalty.  And they’d at some point had a mutual – what?  Regard?

With the knowledge of his sister’s betrayal, of just who he’d chosen all his life to give his loyalty _to,_ did Brienne now again see him as the antithesis of everything she admired? Desired? 

It was somehow both too long and too short a time that they sat there.  The horses snorted now and then, prancing a bit in effort to stay warm while standing there.  Slowly, quietly, as Brienne failed to look away, as her eyes ceased to bore and began to soften, Jaime’s despair tremored, wavered, shifted.  Transmuted into a gravid solemnity. He swallowed once, and his lips parted to permit breath.  As if in response, Brienne’s mouth tilted at one side – her quiet sideways quirk that was barely a smile but changed her whole face.

His heart began to slow from its rapid pace but he did not permit himself to look away until she did.  Once they were moving again, he took a deep lungs-full breath of air so cold it felt clean and crisp, even this close to the pollution of King’s Landing.  It felt pure.  Pure like the honest gaze of the most honorable person he knew. The, if he dared think it, ACCEPTING gaze of the pure-hearted.

When Brienne left his side to rejoin Pod and the Stark men, Jaime was left to himself.  He kept in general sight of others returning North, though.  If his sister decided to send men after him, make good on her threat of killing him, he at least wanted … what?  He snorted to himself.  It wasn’t as if any of these men would step in to keep him out of her clutches.  Witnesses, then, at least; witnesses that he and Cersei had indeed split.  For the same reason, though, he did not seek out Brienne.  She might not decide to fight for him, if he were ambushed.  But she might.  She’d be outnumbered, she’d fail, she’d possibly be killed.

At night there were watches set, and with fewer people on the road someone creeping in would be – at least in theory – more easily caught.  But the day was dangerous.  So he stayed away from Brienne in the daylight. 

Of which, if he didn’t mistake it, the supply over the past month or so had become shorter.  When he awoke in the morning, the sun had not yet arisen, and dusk fell when it still felt early evening to Jaime.  Winter coming, yes, and certain to be a hard one.  There were rumors abroad and about, even in Kings’ Landing, of northerners coming south and predicting a Long Night like the one fabled from thousands of years ago.  Jaime wondered what Brienne thought of such predictions.  Thought of them now brought a sort of horrified fascination.  He could not imagine going days, weeks without the light of day. Years, the decades of a generation even?  What effect would that have on a people, to never see the sun?  On children, growing up in perpetual night?  The idea was so strange.

They passed groups here and there traveling on the road and, when terrain permitted, sometimes off it.  That night, he stopped to camp when the Stark camp did, and prepared the meagre amount of food he’d managed to grab in his hasty packing.  The caution engendered by Brienne’s warnings that Tyl and Rostace had disseminated seemed to hold, at least for these first few days on the road.  Despite ugly looks and low-voiced mutterings, none of the Stark men braced him. Sooner or later, that would change, but for tonight it seemed it wasn’t to be.

Jaime was at the Maid’s fire when it crackled up and he nodded when Brienne again put him into the watch rotation.  He retreated to his own tent soon after eating, though, and just watched the shadows of the others, tall, short, medium, sitting at the fire or moving about it. 

If it was that tallest figure he watched more than any of the others, no one saw or took note.

The days on the road quickly became what those types of days will, an odd kind of watchful monotony where rest wasn’t easy because one was always alert for danger. Winter’s deprivations and the Northwards rising of the dead gave a new edge to each person’s alertness, though.

Brienne made no further effort at communicating with Jaime, in those first few days.  He moved his horse along, always in sight of one or more of her band, and at night camping near them as she directed.  After a while, Tyl and Rostace were no longer so pointed in their looks. The further north they went, the colder the nights grew, and the more the body heat and labor of even one additional person was welcome.  The snow began to stick to the ground, as well, though the numbers of persons on the road helped keet it relatively clear. 

There came a day when Jaime couldn’t stop his shivering.  It was cold, damned cold, the air so dry and clear that even with cloud cover one felt as if one could have seen for miles given a high enough vantage point. He dismounted his steed and walked, as he was wont to do, to keep his blood circulating. It didn’t help much.  And the horse itself looked miserable.

That night, Brienne did approach him, after food had been rationed out and eaten. Jaime was too cold to sit on the frozen ground and was considering trying to sleep atop the horse to share the warmth of its body.  Brienne strode up with a bundle in her arms and dropped it at his feet.

“Take care of your horse,” she gruffed at him in a reprimanding tone, and returned to her side of the fire next to Pod.

Swallowing the retort that she hadn’t stayed to hear, that he was taking as good care of his horse as he could, Jaime picked up what she’d left.  Something smaller but still substantial fell from its folds as he did so.  He shook out the largest item, a thick double-lined woolen horse blanket. He placed it over his mount’s back, drawing the catches tight.  The horse whickered at him and pushed his nose into Jaime’s hair as if in gratitude.  It was by no means bred for this weather but had been good-hearted and steady despite that.

The other item was a heavy North-style fur-lined cloak.  Jaime wasted no time wrapping it about himself. It cut the freezing air immediately and significantly.  He sighed, hunching into the fire, and caught a whiff of scent from what he now wore.  It was Brienne’s own.  It recalled memories of another trip. A warmer one, but the aroma was the same. 

He looked across the fire to her shadowed face.  She had eyes only for her cup of tea.  Take care of the horse, was it? Lightness and heat furled inside, of a kind he had rarely known. He tucked his head into the blessedly warm mounds of fur at his chin, but not far enough to hide the up-tilting corners of his mouth.  It would annoy her to see him grin.  And any type of attention from Brienne was better than none at all.

 


	3. Moving North

The next day as they saddled up to get on the road Brienne’s eyes did flicker over what Jaime wore, though still wordlessly.  Perhaps they took in the lack of shivering, for a rather self-satisfied expression edged at her eyes and mouth.  She was well-wrapped in a thick fur cloak as she had been, but he found himself noticing that it was a bit frayed around the edges, more worn than the one on his shoulders.  She hadn’t given him some spare clothing she’d found amongst the Northerners, he realized.  She’d given him her own best cloak and now wore a spare.

He swallowed and wondered if he should broach that and request that she give him the lesser cloak, instead.  He puzzled at it briefly before giving it up as a lost cause.  Any way he approached the topic she would be offended, her highly sensitive honor impugned.  Here on his own, no one on his side except himself, Jaime decided to just hold his tongue, and under guise of his base sarcasm and arrogance perhaps foment a little private humility.  Which it was – humbling, to be wrapped and warmed by the cloak of a woman, by a charitable gift.  Likely it wouldn’t be his last exercise in such, though, where he was headed.  Somehow, the mortification didn’t sit so ill as it might have in times past.  Had he changed that much, at least?

Perhaps not, he mused later in the day, staring down into the red-eyed, red-nosed face of a bruiser of a man a few inches shorter than himself – a man who’d taken issue with his presence at Lady Brienne’s fire.  Perhaps it was the fur Jaime now wore that had tipped the man over the breaking point.  Perhaps it was just the monotony of the day that bolstered the man’s anger enough to disregard Lady Brienne’s protective warnings.  Whichever, he’d approached with disparaging remarks aimed at Jaime, but which questioned Brienne’s honor as well.  Which Jaime just couldn’t have.  He really couldn’t.  And so, his sword was out, while from the corner of his eye he could see Brienne striding toward them both.  As she neared he could hear a hissing sound she made.

“What brings you North, anyway?” The man was demanding, while his fellow Northerners gathered around, some of them just curious, some cheering on their compatriot.  “Where’s your army at, Queensguard?” ‘Queensguard’ sounded like a curse.  Likely to this man, it was.

“I have a message to bring to the Starks,” Jaime responded, “Not that it’s here or there to you.  None of your business.”  He held his sword pointed down, though.  If at all it could be avoided, he truly did not want to be so stupid as to get into an actual fight with one of these Northerners with whom he was casting his lot.  Trying to cast his lot.

“Eustace!” snapped Brienne, stepping between Jaime and the other man before Jaime side-stepped and pushed her out of the way.  Brienne growled at him and pushed right back.  “Get back to your horse and head out,” Brienne ordered Eustace.  Jaime wondered at the tone of command – surely, she’d no right to it?  But the other man did back off, a step at least.

“What’s he doing here?!” He demanded of Brienne, shaking his dagger in Jaime’s direction.  Jaime’s sword hand tensed in response, his blade lifting until Brienne struck her gloved fist onto the top of his. 

“Idiot,” she snapped at him, which even in the tension of the moment made him want to laugh. So, he did.  Eustace glared at him but lowered his own dagger.

“That’s not a reason for the head of King’s Landing’s army to be headed North without his soldiers,” he grumbled.  “Anyone else could have carried some message up to the Starks.”

“No,” Jaime responded, quieter now of tone, “Not this message.” 

Eustace’s lip curled.  “What message?” he demanded.  “Tell it out, then.”

“It will be told to your Lady Sansa, or your King John Snow, first,” Jaime replied. No matter that Brienne had actually heard it first.  If this group of riled-up Northmen heard Queen Cersei’s true plans, he’d not last 5 minutes.  They’d tear him to shreds, and Brienne would be hurt or killed trying to stop them.

Brienne snorted, almost as if she’d heard that thought.  So did Eustace, and his was far uglier than the Maiden’s.  “So the Kingslayer is reduced to a mere messenger?  How the mighty have fallen!”

Jaime considered that, the current situation, and all the truths that this man Eustace couldn’t possibly know. 

“Yes,” he said, the sole word stark.  Even raw.  He sheathed his sword, and swung around, and headed to his patient destrier.

“Hey!” he heard Eustace exclaim behind him, and Brienne querulously interjected, and then the group of men began to disperse.  Not without muttered comments, though.  He could hear some of them. And later when he saw Brienne’s red cheeks, he knew not all the color was from the cold.  She’d heard the coarse things being said by the men.

About an hour before he knew they’d be stopping that night, Jaime moved his destrier to pace next to Brienne’s.  She’d been riding relatively alone, though Pod was still hovering protectively not too far off, as well as Tyl and Rostace on rotation. 

“I’ll make my own fire tonight,” Jaime told her abruptly. She blinked then looked at him sideways, suspiciously. 

“Why?” she demanded.

He sighed.  He knew she knew his reasons.

“You’ve heard what they’re saying,” he answered.  “Insinuations and outright accusations that you and I- “

Brienne interrupted him with a huff and hitch forward in her saddle.  “You think I care about that?” she bit out.

Jaime shook his head.  Her damnable pride.  “Perhaps I care about it,” he offered in a mocking tone of faux offense, trying to take the edge out of the conversation.  “My faithfulness to my sister is being impugned!  The only loyalty of mine that no one has ever questioned is being questioned – why, I shouldn’t stand for – “

He got no further, for Brienne stopped her horse so abruptly it ended up sideways and in his path.  He hauled on his own reigns, cursing, words which also died when he met the burning blue of her eyes. 

“Would that be correct, Ser Jaime?” She demanded, stiff words through stiff lips.  “Are they right to question that loyalty?”

He saw the bracing of her shoulders and could not for the life of him figure out what she was truly asking.  Was she questioning whether he had truly broken with Cersei or his family?  Did she desire to know that he’d left his sister behind for good?  Did she want to know if that last remaining virtue of his entire life was now up in ashes? He frowned into her face, his attempt at levity long gone. 

“Yes,” he finally replied, short and simple, though painful.  The truthful answer to all those questions. A clean word, ‘yes’.  No ambiguity about it at all.

It still hurt.

He wondered when that might stop. 

Brienne took it in with a silence he couldn’t comprehend, finally kicking her horse moving again.  He did likewise. 

“You will camp by our fire as you have been,” she directed curtly.

“Brienne – “

“You will.  You must arrive alive at Winterfell and tell Jon Snow and Lady Stark your tale.  Anywhere but at my fire, you’ll be murdered in your sleep.”

Which was only true, and silenced Jaime as little else could.  Brienne nodded sharply and guided her mount up to a canter, moving away from him.  He watched her go.  And that night he did as she said.

The ride north was cold, and seemed long, but not without interest.  Brienne was there to be teased, the Northmen there to be mocked, though he did both of those carefully, for there were limits to everyone’s patience these days. 

Then came news - the Wall had fallen.  Even Jaime, who had never seen the thing, struggled to take that in. The Wall had always been there, mythic in proportion but real, in his sense of Westeros.  But it had failed, and the Walkers were pouring through. Pouring through like a flood, so read the raven’s message.  Dark words indeed.

On two occasions, their fire was accosted by Northmen who were too into their cups to see anything but their own anger and hatred for Lannisters.  Not even respect for Brienne’s position as Lady Sansa’s guard and confidante was enough to dissuade them from foolishness. The first time, Brienne and Jaime were able to talk them down, with Tyl and Rostace’s weapons to add emphasis to their points.  The second time, though, they had to fight.  One of the Northmen wasn’t there to continue the journey the next day.

Jaime wondered how the Stark girl or the Snow boy would take that.  If the increased grimness of the murmuring of the Northmen about were any indication, not peaceably.  His prospects at Winterfell were looking more grim.

Closer to Winterfell, it became so cold it hurt to breath at night.   Jaime shot and killed a squirrel and a large winter rabbit and then needed Bannerman Rostace to teach him how to tan the hides and sew them and the fur into a pair of gloves and lining for his boots, to decrease his risk of frostbite.  Rostace’s disparaging attitude as Jaime struggled with the large needle and tough hide, and the fact that it was warranted, rankled.  But in the end Rostace seemed less edgy about the Lannister at his fire.

Not long after, more news filtered back from those who had ranged up the road ahead of them – that Cersei had placed a sizeable bounty on Jaime’s head.  There were incredulous looks at this, but by now both Tyl and Rostace, on the defensive for days against their fellow men-at-arms, seized upon this proof of Jaime’s break with his family.  He heard them discussing his brother’s murder of their father and defection to the Dragon army as though that gave provenance to his own desertion of his sister.  Jaime felt angry, pained, afraid – but kept most of that off his face and out of his voice, he believed.  Most of the time.

The weather slowed their general progress Northward, but progress it was, until they met the edge of a winter storm that dumped feet of snow on the already-covered ground ahead of them, and for a full five days all travel halted.   Most spent the time in their tents, catching up on sleep.  But food supplies dwindled and it dawned on Jaime that, should this winter be the Long Night as he was beginning to believe it might, such travel as this might become highly impractical in the near future.  Even if he survived the battle of the dead, it might at some point be physically impossible to return to King’s Landing, even if he should out of some insanity want to.  His sister might soon be unable to leave there.  Even her stockpiles of stuffs would eventually run out, and she’d be trapped there, in that city with thousands of people who’d by that point be feeling the keen pain of starvation and ever-deepening hatred for her. He forced himself to move on from those thoughts, though.  She had made her choices. And he had made his.

In the melted and re-frozen snow around campfires, restless men sparred with fists and swords.  Jaime watched Brienne guiding Podrick through some complicated foot work.  The youngster was improving, he noted.  Brienne’s style was unchanged – it was awkwardly fluid, which should not be possible but somehow was.  He watched her move in the fire-cast light, and remembered a dream from long ago.  A dream of swords and light.  A dream of beauty.  He swallowed against the sudden tightness of his throat.

It was only when the snow had been laid long enough to begin to pack down that those on the road were able to move on.  That evening, with what Brienne estimated to be perhaps 2 or 3 days’ travel left, a rider accosted their fire.  He slung himself out of the saddle and held out a message, sealed, Jaime saw, with the Wolf.  Brienne frowned.  “For your eyes alone, Milady,” the messenger murmured, “and then only those as you see fit.”

Brienne’s frown was severe when she took it and tilted it into the light of the fire to read it.  The frown froze, then somehow became more severe.

Not good news, Jaime took it.

Brienne threw the paper into the fire and met the messenger’s eyes with a brief nod.  “Say, that Lady Brienne understands,” she told him.  “You will rest here at our fire.”  The man nodded, and gratefully accepted the dish Pod offered him.

Jaime watched as Brienne gathered herself to stand first watch.  When she headed out, something in her stance made him follow her.  The night was cold, so very cold, but still Brienne moved far enough away that the light of the fire wouldn’t dim her eyes to anything untoward in the outer darkness.  She eyed him sideways.  “What do you want?”

“You seem disturbed by that message,” he returned forthrightly. 

She grunted.  She slapped her hands against her upper arms and then moved in a circle, pacing to try to keep the blood circulating.  She hadn’t informed any of the people on her side as to the message’s contents; she of course wasn’t going to give them over to him.  But she stamped her feet on the ground, and he rubbed his gloved hands up and down his arms strenuously and followed her in a circuit around their fire.

“I will tell you,” she said abruptly after full minutes of walking in silence.  His brow rose in surprise.

“Why?” he blurted.  She didn’t respond, her lips thinning as she mulled over what she planned to say. She cast her glance sharply around them, and stopped walking.  At her side, he did likewise.  She angled her body toward him and then, to his surprise, stepped into him and lowered her tone of voice. 

Jaime listened, chin tilted up to better catch her soft words.  She didn’t answer his question, but she gave him the contents of the message.  He stared at her when she’d finished.  No wonder Sansa had not sent a raven. If it had been intercepted, and this news went loose?  If and when they learned this, it would rock the Northmen’s perceptions of their world.  Jaime took it in, slowly pacing beside Brienne in the track they’d by now worn into the snow around their fire.  Why, he wondered, had she given him this information?  Surely the Starks would be livid if they found out she’d done so.  He glanced sideways briefly at her set face.  They were largely in the dark under an overcast night sky with shadow gradation cast over them by the flickering fire, and Brienne’s expression was difficult to make out.  She was so true and straight, utterly lacking in convolution, and yet she so often confounded him.

“Jon Snow is the child of Rhaegar and Lyanna,” she’d said.  “Of their _wedded_ union.” 

A mental image introduced itself, made vague by time, of the Rhaegar Targaryen Jaime had known in his youth. He’d had a long rather morose face, but the ladies found him attractive.  He tried to imagine the young prince there in a tower room with his beloved Lyanna, anticipating the birth of his child, but compelled to secrecy – something about it stuck with him as they paced, around and back and forth.  After a time he spoke into the hushed air.

“What would you do if you were Rhaegar, and someone saw you with Lyanna?  Knowing you would both – all  three – be dead as soon as Robert or her family found out?”

Brienne jerked her chin once to the side, a gesture that seemed to indicate a negative. “I don’t know.”

“Would you kill that person?”  Her answer was important to him. Time was, she wouldn’t. She had refused to kill that traveler that long-ago day on the Kingsroad. But that was how they had been captured.  That was how her virtue was threatened, and how he lost his hand.  It was how she ended up in the damned bear pit.

What did she think, now, having lived through those events?  Would she do differently? The longer she delayed answering the more strongly he desired to know.  He pressed.  “Would you kill to protect them - your wife, your unborn child?”

She was frowning at him, as she so often did, though it was a considering type of frown.  But, straightforward as she was, she didn’t ask why he was asking.

“It would depend,” she said, finally.

“On what?!”

“On the situation.  Is the person a friend? Likely to support me?  Does he have honor?”

Jaime snorted.

She persisted.  One of the things she did best, Brienne.  Persistence. “If not, is he armed?  Are my wife and child in immediate danger?  Do I have time to get them out of harm’s way? Do I have the means?”

Jaime shook his head vehemently.  He felt his left fist clench around his sword’s hilt. “The person is not a friend, and will definitely reveal your secret, but is defenseless.  Now is your only chance to make certain no one ever knows, to make sure you don’t lose her …” he heard the passion in his voice too late, and lost his thought, his voice trailing off into the freezing air.  Brienne looked at him, closely, and – something else.  Fearfully?

“Jaime,” her voice was rough and hard and matched the frigid air around them, “Why did you do it?”

He froze as still as the landscape.  He wanted to find a joke, to scornfully turn her question away, to use any one of the skills he’d acquired over the years for coping with others’ poor opinions of him. But wordplay refused to rise to his tongue. He knew Brienne had at least heard Lady Catelyn’s accusation, all those years ago, though she’d never asked him about it.  Until now. He swallowed.

And found himself telling the truth.

“No reasons but ones you’d find shameful.”

“Shameful like what? Like King Aerys?”  Now Brienne was the one to clasp at her sword.  He wondered if she knew or if that was as much an instinctive movement as it was for him.  She was taking deliberate steps into the space where he stood, and stopped moving when she was close enough that it was uncomfortable. 

 “No – no, not like that.” He took a breath and settled his feet more firmly, more deeply, into the snow beneath them.  The crunch was loud.   “You would think this – truly shameful.”

She didn’t dispute the shamefulness or not of impaling Aerys through the back.  In his private thoughts, Jaime didn’t think what he had done to King Aerys was shameful.  He never really had, which was why he was so disillusioned with the opinions of most people.

What he’d done to the Stark boy, though …

Brienne waited, so straight and decent and right, and for a moment he hated that about her.  Hated her.  As he tried to dredge up a lie, to preserve something of her image of him as a man with some sort of worth, he found he could not force the falseness out of his throat.  He couldn’t face her damned honest eyes and lie to her.

“He was as vulnerable as it’s possible to be.  I intended murder.”  His voice was hoarse, his throat suddenly arid. And even telling the truth, he couldn’t look at her face, so full of integrity, and tell her of his most shameful act.

“Tell me,” Brienne demanded, stepping around in front of him.  Their thick cloaks were brushing, now.  Jaime’s heart was pounding.  Disgusted with himself, he closed his eyes.  _Just tell her.  Get it over with._ Get it all – her regard, any hope of fighting the dead, any chance of expiation, over with.  When amputating a limb, just one clean, swift slice had to be best.

“ _Tell_ me.” Brienne insisted, and without warning he felt her strong hand clenching onto the elbow of his stumpy arm.  The touch burned.  He gritted his teeth but suddenly thought, _she might never touch me again,_ and he couldn’t move to shake her off.

“Tell me!” Brienne shook him, instead.  Every muscle tensed, breathing as rapidly as though he’d just fought a battle, Jaime gritted out –

“I thought Cersei would be pleased.”

Silence.  Stillness.  He wasn’t being shaken any more.  He realized his eyes were closed, and he opened them with the sounds of that pathetic, worse than pathetic, motive still in his own ears.  Brienne stood staring, her hand still on his arm.  Brow furrowed, just as it had been while he told her the story of King Aerys and the wildfire.  Taking it in? Had she even heard him?

He found it in himself, now, to look into her clear blue gaze.  And then he found his inner perversity as well, to try to force a reaction from her. “But you knew this, surely!  The boy saw me fucking Cersei.  She demanded I ‘do something’.  I did.  For – I thought – for love of her.” His voice was growing increasingly hoarse, but he continued to spit out the bitter words.  “Not to protect my children, who were hardly mine.  Just to please her, so that she wouldn’t deny me her body.  It was worse than, than – you know how some people come to love milk of the poppy so, they cannot live without it?  Will steal, lie, connive, murder to have it?”

Brienne nodded, numb-like.

“It was like – like that,” he finished with a break in his voice.  “My love for Cersei.”

Now she reacted – her hand clenched tightly around his arm, once, and then she let go.  She stepped away.

“A child, he was,” Jaime continued, his voice harsh and rising in pitch.  Now that the first of the tale was out, the rest wanted to be told, too.  All the despicable details.  “A YOUNG child, clinging to the stone wall of that tower.  Completely defenseless.”

Brienne’s lips pressed together.  Her eyelids shuttered the brilliance of his eyes.  Somewhere at gut level, something in Jaime cracked jaggedly.

“I was _casual_ about it.”  He grit the ugly words out between clenched teeth.  Somehow, he couldn’t stop talking. It was all pushing at the back of his tongue and kept coming louder and faster.  “I made some sarcastic comment and went right back to my sister.  I didn’t even stay at the window to watch him land!”

Brienne turned away, and began to move again in the track they had made through the twice-frozen snow.  Even more ungainly than usual, she was, with short sharp movements. 

Jaime’s voice was guttural now.  “It was monstrous, and I did it without a second thought! So that I could keep fucking my evil, mad sister!” The pace of his phrases was frantic.

Brienne was moving away from him, but she paused with her back to him.

“And now?” Her voice was so gravelly he didn’t immediately understand.

“Now, what?”  His left hand was a fist tight at his side.

“Given the same – circumstances.  Now. What – would – you – DO?”

He groaned and barely noticed that his metal hand hit tightly against the fist of his fleshly hand.  “I don’t know, Brienne.” _Baby in a trebuchet …_ He hadn’t wanted to do it, no.  But what he’d said to Ryman Frey, he still believed – it was foolish to make threats one was not prepared to carry out.  Threatening to toss the infant saved the lives of other babes who’d have died of starvation in the siege – did that matter?  Did that make it the lesser evil choice?  When all possibilities were evil, did lesser or greater even matter?

Brienne never turned to look at him.  A blessing, not to face those eyes? Or a curse, not to have one more glimpse of them? He didn’t know.  He stood still and she moved on and left him there.

The cracked thing inside his belly broke open fully.


	4. Going on the Defensive

After that last snowstorm that stranded them for 5 days on the road, all were eager to get to Winterfell.  The anticipation was in the air.  But making that happen was slower going than it ordinarily would have been.  Icy spots on the road could surprise a human or a horse treading too quickly.  Daylight was definitely not lasting as long as it used to, and it was too dangerous to try to move in the dark especially when snow further shortened visibility, so the hours of travel per day were cut somewhat shorter as well. 

When it snowed at night, Jaime found he was especially edgy.  He would be crouched before the fire, blessing it for warmth, and think he saw a movement in the periphery of his gaze.  When he turned to stare out into the darkness, the swirl of snow made patterns that his mind would insist was movement, the purposeful movement of a being or creature.  More than once his hand would fall to his sword as he stared intently outward, only to have the pattern shift.  It was as though the snow was both a curtain between him and the world, and another world of its own from which all manner of horror could emerge.

“You can get snow crazy,” Tyl offered one night, in a rare showing of being willing to address Jaime directly.  “Thinking there’s something there all the time, when most of the time there’s not.”

Inded it was somewhat hypnotic, the flight of the snow, if one stared at it long enough.  But Jaime hitched one shoulder up.  “I’d rather be wrong about it most of the time and ready the one time there is something there, than to not be prepared and then miss that one time.”

Tyl gave a desultory shrug in return.  Brienne, though, commented how it made the men nervous to have Jaime’s hand so near his sword all evening long.  Jaime nodded, and did make an effort not to be constantly ready to draw his weapon, but still he found himself staring out and away from the fire’s light.  It was a fruitless exercise, for no matter what one did, one couldn’t actually see anything coming through the snow until it was close enough.  Straining one’s eyes until they hurt didn’t help anything!  And yet strain he did, trying to see further, past the flakes. Was that a shadow, seeming to coalesce? There – he squinted, cocked his head, and stood to his feet.  There _was_ something. Pod, bent rinsing out their used cups with wood ash, jumped at Jaime's abrupt movement.

“What is it?”

Jaime watched, his lips pressed together, waiting for what he was almost certain he’d seen to approach, to materialize through the dark and light and become something he could kill.

But nothing did.  He grit his teeth, waited a minute more, angling his head around.  Tyl chortled, nastily.

“Bloody idiot! There’s nothing out there!”

Brienne flicked her gaze back and forth amongst the three men.  Jaime cleared his throat, feeling flushed and foolish.  She ignored him.  “It’s about time for Rostace to come in off watch,” she advised Pod.  “Finish up there and go relieve him.”

Pod nodded assent and hurried about drying the cups so they could be re-packed into saddle bags for tomorrow’s travel.  Jaime moved back to his feet.  “I’ll do that,” he told the squire.  “Go on.”  Having a task, even one so lowly he’d never actually done it before, might get his mind off the imaginary horrors in the outer darkness.

Pod’s eyebrows went up, but then he glanced past Jaime’s shoulder to Brienne.  Whatever signal he’d gotten from her, he nodded and stepped back, drying his hands against his fur. 

Tyl raised his arms above his head in a long stretch.  “Bed for me,” he announced, gathering his feet beneath himself.  “Seeing as I’ve got third watch.”

Past him and out beyond the swirling snow, again there seemed to be a darker darkness, a more solid shape amid the shifting flakes.  Jaime sighed at himself.  Why, he wondered, did the mind play such tricks on itself?  Even though this time he didn’t focus on the illusion, it still seemed to be taking on deliberate movement,  a sort of shambling walk, a … a _face._

“Gods!” He exclaimed, and his sword was out, and he was charging.  Tyl yelled and grabbed for his own sword as Jaime surged at him, and Brienne leaped to her feet, exclaiming “Wha –“

 But Jaime just passed Tyl with a shove, and met the form moving at the edge of their fire circle with Valyrian steel. He only had a chance to glimpse a shocking flash of too-blue eyes before the thing disintegrated into shards.

Brienne was beside him now, and it was good, for the thing wasn’t alone.  Tyl was there as well, his sword of common steel out.  _No._   Jaime shoved him again, this time to the ground.  The man looked like he was yelling again but Jaime had no time to register that as he kicked the useless sword as far way from the man’s hand as he could before moving to cross his own sword over another wight’s dagger.  He slipped in above it to bring another shattering end to something that had once been a woman.  He saw Brienne swing Oathkeeper through another of the horrors.  Pod was brandishing a dagger, behind them around the other side of the fire, and Jaime turned to put him on the ground as well, but was caught by Brienne’s shoulder, turning him back to the attack.  “Dragonglass!” she shouted at him.  “He has dragonglass!”

That was well, then.  Jaime met Brienne’s shoulder with his own, and slung once more into the fight.

It was over in minutes.  For twice as long as it took to shatter the horrific dead things, Pod, Brienne, and Jaime faced the outer darkness with their swords at the ready, all three now searching as Jaime had been doing earlier. 

The moments stretched as their breathing calmed.  Jaime was just giving a thought to Rostace, out on watch, when Tyl – who was now on his feet, swordless – crouched low and came at him in a wrestler’s stance, anger contorting his features.

Brienne stepped between them before he reached Jaime, and stopped his attack by dint of a boot to the man’s shoulder.

“Stay out of this,” Tyl snarled, while Jaime edged around Brienne to face him. 

“Don’t be an idiot,” she snapped back.

“He kept me out of the fight!” Tyl straightened, shaking out the arm of the shoulder she’d shoved.  “Kicked my sword to hell and gone! Downed me so one of those things could find me easy prey –“

“He SAVED you, you pizzle!”

Jaime barely restrained a snort.  

Brienne continued, glaring. “What did you think you were going to do with that sword?  You need Valyrian steel or dragonglass to fight the dead!”

Tyl stilled.  Clearly, the commonness of his steel hadn’t even occurred to him.  He straightened slowly, frowning.

“Ah. That’s – that’s right.”  He visibly wilted, swallowing; if the light had been better, Jaime imagined he could have seen his complexion paling. 

There were sounds from down the road.  “There must be more,” Jaime told Brienne, turning toward the noise of battle just as Rostace appeared at the edge of firelight.  “There are,” the watchman reported grimly, “Around at least two other camps.”

Brienne’s troupe went to meet them, but when they reached the next closest fire it was over.  Not all groups had been as lucky as they.  Three men lay dead from wounds dealt by ice weapons.  Brienne gave directions that they be burned; by the time they reached the last of the Northmen’s fires, she didn’t need to, it was already being done.  That fire was Eustace’s.

He regarded Jaime and the sword he held, causing Jaime to grip it more firmly.  If the fire of battle was still in the man’s blood –

But no.  Eustace shook his head, sheathing his own sword.  “Time was, a Lannister approached my fire, I’d have his head,” he told Brienne shortly.  “After this …” he paused to watch the light flare up as the corpse of his compatriot caught fire.  “I’ve not fought the dead before tonight.  It has a way of changing your perspective.”

Not once did he glance at Jaime.  But Brienne held the man’s eyes for an extended moment before granting a short nod. 

Back at their own fire, Pod gave his dragonglass dagger a solemn and grim stare before sheathing it.  Jaime thought he knew why.  The obsidian was so fragile.  With it Pod had killed a wight dressed only in rags.  At some point, they’d face ones still in the armor of the soldiers they’d been in life.  The dragonglass would be useless against armor.  One would need to be careful, would need to seek openings and chinks in the armor. 

Pod went belatedly to stand watch and Rostace and Brienne both turned in, claiming exhaustion.  Jaime took a couple of turns about the fire, trying to work the battlelust out of his blood before turning in.  Tyl stood at the opening to the tent shared by himself, Pod and Eustace, hesitantly, then turned abruptly to face Jaime.

“Thank you,” he said shortly.  “For my life.  Seems likely, anyway, that you saved it.”

Jaime’s chin lifted in surprise.  Then he nodded. “We’ll need to see about distributing dragonglass, if your King Jon isn’t already working on that.”  Best not give too much embarrassing attention to the man’s gratitude.  It could turn sour just as easily as it had sweetened.

“He is, so I’m told,” Tyl returned, and ducked inside.

Jaime sighed.  He wasn’t tired.  He was energized.  The battled had been short, too short to expend the fire in his blood.  He did force himself to lay down, alone in his tent, though.  Where he was suddenly accosted by memories.

He’d fought at Brienne’s side, and was just now, somehow, _noticing_ that. It seemed in some way momentous, this event he hadn’t even marked until it was over.  Who would ever have thought, dreams aside, that they would fight together?  She’d been there, near him, dancing in and out of his vision as they engaged.  He stared up at the canvas of his tent’s roof, seeing instead the breadth of her fur-covered shoulders as she swung her sword, the planting of her feet as she wielded it, the line of her legs as she ducked and darted forward.  In the light of the fire, facing the wights, she had been almost beautiful.  Thrusting, driving, parrying when her opponent held a sword; he’d been making those movements as well, laying waste to the threat about them.  Back and forth, excitement in his veins, letting his body take over and do what it needed – and then it was over.  Abruptly, and they’d stood there with their chests moving quickly and Jaime still feeling that surge in his veins.  A surge that his lower anatomy was beginning to react to, now, reliving it. He clenched his eyelids closed, briefly, then flung an arm across his eyes with a quiet groan.  The available hours for sleeping were already shortened, and it now seemed he wouldn’t be taking advantage of the ones that were left.


	5. Approaching Winterfell

Brienne sat upright in her tent at the hint of a sound outside.  It wouldn’t be Pod or Tyl changing watches, it was too soon for that.  But surely, that was a footstep? She gathered up Oathkeeper and ducked out through the flap, into surprisingly clear air.  The snow had stopped.

It was Jaime.  He stood before the fire, which was banked but not out – in this cold, letting the fire go out at night meant possible death before morning.  Pod, on watch, would be checking to make sure that didn’t happen.  Jaime was shifting his weight from foot to foot, and moving them almost in a sparring pattern.  His breath puffed into the dark. He stopped when he saw her.

“You’re not sleeping.” She frowned at the obviousness of her own statement.  Jaime shook his head. “You’re loud,” she added grumpily. They had spoken very little and only as necessary since that painful conversation in which he’d confessed his addiction to his sister and the evil of his resulting actions. 

That night, Brienne had made it to the other side of the fire, out of Jaime’s line of sight, before sinking back against a cold boulder.  Her teeth were grit tightly together against a kind of wail that had been inside.  A quivering, angry, distressed cry.  Standing there so close to Jaime, hearing his confession, she had found, to her shock, that there was dampness standing on her lower eyelids.  She’d had to go before he saw.  She should have had disgust – no, horror, even hatred – to show him.  And while those were there, there was also something else.  Something softer, unidentifiable.

Why had he told her that?  What had possessed him to spill all that ugliness in a way she was certain he never had before, to anyone?  It was as though he’d wanted to ascertain that she knew all his darkness.  He’d desired, for unknowable reasons, to convince her of the depths of his depravity.  Convinced she was, and had been many times, throughout their acquaintance.  She’d known for a long time, in the abstract at least, that he’d tried to murder one of Lady Catelyn's sons, Lady Sansa's little brother.  Hearing him that night, though, describing the act and his twisted reason for it?

She refused to cry for such depravity.  She would not.  She had straightened away from the boulder resolutely. But Jaime had told her all of that and hadn’t even tried to defend the action.  Unlike his confession in the bath at Harrenhal, when he’d clearly viewed the act he was describing as just and undeserving of men’s judgement, here a few nights ago he’d deliberately painted himself in the worst of lights.  So she’d asked what he would do, _now_ , because he didn’t seem the same man who’d casually try to murder a child.  There in the snow Ser Jaime had been at the very least distressed at what he’d done.  Why? What was different? She knew he had honor in him, but could that honor pull him back from unfathomable depths of wickedness, so he could be better? Be GOOD?

He hadn’t had a strong answer to her question about whether he would make the same choice, now.  But he’d said, ‘was’.  His love for his sister ‘was’, not ‘is’.  And he’d likened his attachment to her to an unhealthy desire for milk of the poppy.  And, of proofs he could offer should she ask – he was _here._   Unless it was as his sister’s spy – which she just could not see the logic of.  It was because he’d promised to be.  That spoke, to her, of a deliberate change in direction.   

She remembered the feeling that had welled inside when he’d explained why he’d come North, alone, no army and no guarantee of acceptance or even life, and having deliberately turned his back on his rabid sister.  It had nearly choked Brienne, that emotion.  It been pride.  She’d been _proud_ of him.

Perhaps, perhaps, what was happening was that his heart had awakened from its long slumber, and could now hear his conscience.

Brienne would watch.  She’d wait.  Perhaps she’d ask her question again.

Here, now, he cocked a half-smile at her that flickered in the firelight.  It was welcome.

“Apologies, la - wench.”

Eyes narrowing, she assessed that ‘wench’, looking his face over for a hint of what it meant.  That near ‘lady’ wasn’t an accident, she thought.  This was an attempt to return to their former jabbing camaraderie, perhaps.  She wasn’t certain of how that could be, given that talk in the snow.  But if anyone could pull it off, Jaime could.  She was … amenable. 

She had missed talking with him, the past few days.

She shoved away the knowledge of how very much she had missed it.  Years she’d known him, and years there had always been something between them that she valued.  That and the glimpses she’d had of his eyes that told her he knew about and valued it too – nothing else had ever been possible, or needed.

She paced to the fire, suddenly unwilling to return alone to her tent. Jaime watched her come and seated himself on the opposite end of the log she chose.  “You’re not sleeping, either,” he observed, just as obvious as she.  She shook her head shortly.

“It’s cold,” she told him, her voice wry.  Her tent was cold, and lonely.  _Lonely._ A strange word, that.  One she seldom if ever used.  She’d been alone, in one form or another, for most of her adult life.  Why now was she feeling a need to not be?

He nodded.  “It is.  If it keeps getting colder, may not be safe for us to be in our tents alone.  Might be the night will come when we need to share body heat.”

Brienne rolled her eyes.  But it was so familiar, this ground between them – he making jokingly suggestive remarks and she shoving them away or shrugging them off – that she felt warmed, from the inside. Jaime waggled an eyebrow at her, and she sighed in return, but they were bathed in firelight and she was warm and feeling somehow soft.  She stared straight ahead but let a little of her inner smile escape.

Jaime seemed to be staring at her, there at her side.  She caught a glimpse of his face out of the corner of her eye. 

“If you hadn’t seen that wight,” she offered after awhile, “we’d probably some of us not be breathing right now.”

Jaime nodded. “Maybe now you’ll all just let off about me staring about when it’s snowing.”

Brienne hitched a shoulder.  “Maybe.” And turned an arch expression on him.

He smiled, she saw.  Then he shook his head, his mood seeming to shift. “Brienne.”

“Yes?”

“I have missed you.”

She felt her body still.  She stared into the flames without seeing them, focused on the man beside her, and then almost against her will she turned her head back to him. He was already looking at her, just looking, a smile slight and soft on his face. 

She took a breath, and it wasn’t quite deep enough, so she took another.  She felt her brow furrowing.  It had been so long since she’d seen that look.  And it had always been when she was moving away from him.  Leaving him.  It had never before been from this close a distance. She had wondered if it was still there, that look, inside him.

Now here it was.

Maybe, again, it was the night – the recent peril – the warmth of the fire.  But she wanted to be honest.  She desired nothing else between the two of them, herself and Jaime.  Just the truth.

“I've missed you as well,” she answered, though she was shy and awkward, and said it to the ground.

He took a long breath, now, one that she could hear sighing slowly out.  He seemed to relax into himself, in a way that she hadn’t seen since he’d appeared at her fire.  “All those times …” his voice faded away to silence. Brienne waited, her desire to hear the rest of his sentence so strong it almost scared her.  Finally, he continued.  “All those times that I sent you, or you went off, and I watched you leaving. I wanted” - his voice had gotten a little rugged.  A touch ragged.  But it was Brienne who swallowed. “I wanted to go with you.”

She’d known that, really.  Brienne had been able to tell back then, mostly because with her he didn’t really try to hide much of himself.  She’d seen that he was good at that, keeping his inner being away from prying eyes.  She’d prized the fact that he didn’t do it with her. But still, to sit here next to him, nowhere to go for an entire night and no expectation of riding away from him in the near future, and hear him say it aloud – her heart kinked up inside her chest until it hurt.  Her lips parted, admitting gusts of vapored breath into the night air, but no words would rise to them.  And it seemed Jaime, having given voice to that silent truth, had nothing more to say.  So they sat there like that, in silence, for awhile.

It was good, Brienne felt.  Very good, to sit in silence with Jaime.

He did eventually banish the quiet.

“How much further, do you think, to Winterfell?”

She shook her head.  “If the weather holds off, perhaps two more days.  If the snow worsens … I don’t know.  Why?  Are you in such a hurry to tell your bad news?”

Jaime huffed.  “Not that.  It’s - fighting those things clarified something for me, completely.”  He shifted his elbows onto his thighs, pulling his arms out from beneath the cape.  He held them out, both hands, one gold and one flesh, both gloved.  The fur of the right one was wrapped around and up over the stump of his arm.  Gold was cold, Brienne thought, and wondered why he bothered with it.  She felt a sudden urge to reach out to him, touch him.  But there had never been much of that, between them.  Usually it had happened under singular circumstances.  Touching others wasn’t something she did, routinely, and she doubted she was good at it.  More importantly, she had no earthly idea how he would react if she did such a thing.  She quelled her hand, pressing it into her own thigh beneath her furs as Jaime continued speaking.

“I understand well that I may die at Winterfell, bearing such news.  But now, after today – this is what I want to do.”

Brienne nodded, once more seeing the flames before her. “Fight the dead?”  
  
Jaime nodded.  Then shook his head.  “Not precisely.  Fight for the living. That’s what I want to do.” He tucked his lips in, almost tentative, for a moment.  “Will you help give me a chance at doing that, Brienne?” The request was so quiet, almost small.  Brienne blinked at the fire.

“Yes,” she answered simply, and looked over and met his eyes. His searched hers. She nodded her affirmation, and he let the small smile shift over his features again.

“Thank you, my Lady.”


	6. Arriving at Winterfell

Soon, on a cold afternoon in dimming light, the walls of Winterfell appeared as a smudge in the distance.  When they neared the castle, Jaime marked the ways in which it was unchanged – and those in which it was.  There were blackened areas, and some which had not been built back up after the war.  There were others still in a state of being repaired.  Jaime viewed it all with a jaundiced eye.  Brienne had made clear that she felt the Snow boy and the Stark girl – King and Lady though they might be, now – would be reasonable about sparing his life once he spilled his guts about his dear sister.  This despite the clansman blood he’d spilled when they attacked on the road. He himself was not so certain that the Stark clan would be willing to twice allow the same supposed traitor live.

But he’d promised.  He would do all he could to keep that promise.

He wasn’t allowed time for rest, or a bath, or even food.  Mere minutes after he and Brienne – for since Winterfell came into view she’d not moved far from him – crossed through the gate, a young runner approached. 

“Lady Sansa will see you,” she informed them, and led the way up a flight of stairs and then down a hallway.  Through two doorways, down another hall, and then down two very long flights of stairs.  Even in its diminished state, Winterfell was impressive.

As they walked, Jaime reminded his rapidly beating heart that Brienne had promised to help him.  Surely that meant taking his side with Lady Sansa.

They entered a part of Winterfell that had to be quite far underground, was very chilly, and smelled of must and disuse, but also oddly of freshly dried herbs and spices and – ale?  The runner led them to a room that was not what Jaime expected.  Lady Sansa wasn’t regally seated somewhere, lady-ing over those around her while waiting to hear Jaime’s message before passing judgement.  She was in a large space filled nearly to the brim with kegs.  As Jaime, Brienne, and the runner stood there, rumbling filled the corridor behind them; a worker rolled a keg down and into the room, and more came after him.  Within moments the last bit of space in the room was used and Lady Sansa had to step out.  She nodded to the workers.

“Seal it,” she directed, and watched as the door was locked, warm wax fitted around the locking mechanism and then imprinted with the Direwolf before it hardened.

“Next room,” she directed, and then gestured at Brienne and Jaime to follow her. 

“I hear you bring information, Ser Jaime,” she said coolly over her shoulder. 

“My Lady,” he responded, and frowned at her back.  This wasn’t how he’d imagined delivering his information.  But Lady Sansa swung into another doorway, and he and Brienne crowded in after her.  This one was smaller, and redolent with the scent of recently cured venison.  It hung in ranks on racks from floor to ceiling.  Jaime felt and then heard his stomach growl. Beside him, Brienne tucked in a smirk.

“Perhaps you’ve heard of the price on my head,” he offered to Lady Sansa’s back.  Her head was bobbing slightly as she appeared to be counting full racks of meat versus those yet to be filled.  Surely she had household managers or even accountants to keep track of what they were storing for winter!

“I’ve broken with my sister.  That much is true.  But I am not … well, perhaps now I am guilty of treason.”  He stopped to consider that thought.  Didn’t know how to handle it.  Moved on from it as Lady Sansa finally turned to face him, face serene but a hint of impatience beneath its coolness.

“My” -strangely, abruptly he could not get the word ‘sister’ to exit his mouth – “the queen.  She was lying and manipulating all of us, that day at the Dragonpit.  She is planning, with Euron Greyjoy, to hire the Golden Company, bolster her own army’s strength while she keeps it in the South, and allow the Northerners to fight the Walkers without them.  She expects … she thinks she will come out a victor, in the end, once other forces on the continent have fought and decimated each other.”

Sansa stared at him.  After a moment, her lip curled in a mixture of disbelief and disgust.  “But winter is here,” she said, her tone just as if she had said ‘snow is white.’  “The Long Night is nearly here. Even in King’s Landing, the days must be shorter than they have been in remembrance.”

Jaime nodded.  “It was snowing as I left there,” he murmured.  Something in him wanted to release at the fact that Sansa had not immediately called for his head to part ways with his shoulders.  Perhaps he would survive this day, after all.

Sansa’s lips firmed.  “How do I know this is true?” 

Or, perhaps not.  “If she has done as you describe, your sister is a colossal fool.”  Jaime couldn’t help slanting a glance at Brienne, at this echo of her sentiment.  Brienne met his gaze evenly, with no effort to disguise it from Lady Sansa. 

“I have never heard that Cersei is a fool,” Sansa continued.  “Cunning, wily, yes.”

“She can be – astonishingly short-sighted, when it comes to certain personal ambitions,” Jaime offered slowly.  Sansa was not the girl he had known.  She had grown, but she had also acquired a cold assessing gaze and an affect that was nearly, but not quite, arrogance.  He wondered at it.

Sansa cocked her head coolly and abruptly changed topics.  
  
“I hear one of my men did not make it back alive,” she addressed Brienne.

Brienne stiffened.  “That is true, Milady.  A group of three disregarded my warnings that you and your brother would want to hear Ser Jaime’s report from his own lips.  They could not be dissuaded from fighting. “

Sansa allowed silence to stretch for a moment. 

“Jaime Lannister is not known for his honor,” she said finally, as if Jaime had exited the room.  He swallowed down the sardonic retort that sprang to his lips.  It wasn't as if he hadn't heard it a thousand times. His life hung in the balance here.  It was not the time for witticisms. Brienne would know best how to handle this. He had every confidence.

“No,” Brienne agreed.  She added – nothing.

That was it? She’d given her word to try to get him a chance to fight!  He was trusting her with his life!  Jaime opened his mouth to speak.  Sansa waved him to silence still without even giving him the courtesy of moving her gaze.  Jaime bit his back teeth together, hard, to keep his words in.

Once again, Sansa didn’t speak. Finally, folding her arms awkwardly in front of her, Brienne did.

“I vouch for him, my Lady, on my honor,” she murmured, eyes on the floor. 

Jaime’s breath left him in a small surprised rush.  He’d thought she’d argue for the usefulness of his knowledge of Cersei’s mind, her government, her key people.  He hadn’t expected her to lay her own honor on the line for him.

Hadn’t wanted it, either.

Sansa measured her Lady in a glance. Measured accurately, it seemed to Jaime, judging by her next words.

“Very well.  You shall be his surety, then.  Be certain he does not leave, or betray us, while I have his information confirmed.”

Jaime wondered how she thought she was going to do that as Sansa swept toward the door.  Once there, she paused, and turned back to him.

“Euron Greyjoy has set off in the general direction of the Free Cities.  We shall await news of who he contacts there.” 

Ah. Question answered. Sansa left.

Jaime blinked, then looked up at Brienne, whose expression was suddenly lighter. 

“Well, Ser Jaime, it appears you will live to see another day.”  She, too, turned toward the door. Jaime followed, his stomach rumbling again.  Brienne averted her face, but he heard her snort.

Out past the door, Lady Sansa’s impatient voice sounded: “Come!” He found his heart lighter, to match Brienne’s face, as they followed Lady Sansa back up the corridor. He wanted to speak, to ask why she’d done that - risked her honor for him.  Did she have that much trust, even after their talk that snowy night on the road, that she was willing to agree to forfeit her life should he prove false, and run?  He wanted to scoff at the notion.  But his chest was strangely tight, and her expression was the least dark he’d seen it since their reunion, and he couldn’t.

A thought formed small and then became full-fledged in his mind, having a liquefying effect on his gut - was this the measure of how much Brienne actually valued him?


	7. Waiting at Winterfell

When runners came with the tale of Jon Snow and the Dragon Queen’s imminent arrival, Jaime found his thoughts more on seeing Tyrion again than on the fact that his existence was once again imperiled, depending on whether the King in the North chose to honor his sister’s decision.  He went up to the courtyard alone and stood while Sansa met her brother with every evidence of happiness at his arrival. Two dragons were visible, their wings folding down around their torsos at a height higher than the fortified walls.  But Jaime’s eyes were for his own brother.  The thatch of thick curly hair came into view around a horse’s withers and Jaime’s chest clenched.  He swallowed.  But his usual sardonic face was firmly in place when Tyrion caught sight of him.

The other’s eyebrows rose, his mouth ‘O’d, and his step quickened.  Jaime couldn’t restrain a small smile as Tyrion came quickly to his side.

“Brother,” he murmured down at the bright head that tilted back to see him.  “Brother,” Tyrion returned, solemnly, but with a twinkle behind his eyes.  A twinkle that was slowly overcome by a frown.  “Why are you here?  Not that we don’t need you and – you’re very welcome, at least to me.  But –“

“Cersei lied,” Jaime interjected, by now tiring of telling the tale.  Something must have befallen the raven they had sent.  He made a mental note to inform Lady Sansa so.

Tyrion’s face changed.  His jaw hardened.  His eyes – despair showed, for an instant, before he was able to thin his lips and then open them to curse. Roundly, widely, and at length enough to still be at it when Jon and Sansa approached. 

Sansa had informed Jon, so Jaime was spared that.  But the wild-haired young man had many questions.  He narrowed in on the Golden Company quickly.  Here Tyrion jumped in, and by that time they were all back indoors, but in the Great Hall, a place Jaime did not favor.  In brightest sunlight it was dim and chill.  In this winter, it was dark and cold.

“We shall have to try to interfere,” Tyrion addressed them all from behind a plate loaded with food through which he was making rapid headway.  He laid his fork down with a sigh.  “Is this all there is?”

“Rations,” Lady Sansa replied shortly. “Winter is here.”

Tyrion bowed his head, chastened.  He then quaffed the water in his wine cup with every evidence of enjoyment.

“Interfere?” Queen Daenerys prodded, sitting tall in fine furs.  Jaime held his golden hand inside his own that had come to him by way of Brienne, and wondered at the provenance of hers. Very off-topic, that was.  Perhaps his mind’s way of avoiding the fact that Jon hadn’t yet mentioned Jaime’s fate.

“Yes, with Cersei’s dealings with the Iron Bank or with Euron’s with the Golden Company. Or both.”

Arguments erupted about who would go.  In the end, it was determined that Daenerys and Jon would stay at Winterfell, to guide their people as they prepared for the fight and the Long Night, and that after a short overnight rest, Tyrion and Sansa would be traveling to the Free Cities.

“To do what?  Say what?” Specifics hadn’t been discussed, and Jaime had little faith in this plan.

“The truth,” Tyrion replied, his expression past sober and on to grave.  “To anyone we can. We have nothing else.”

Jon Snow took time to personally interview Jaime, though, in the short amount of time he had available.  When he appeared as summoned, it was to the sight of Daenerys seated at Jon’s side.  She remained throughout Jon’s questioning with an interjection here and there.  Jaime was conscious that his fate still hung very much in the balance.  Strangely enough, though, Brienne didn’t appear for his questioning by the King and Queen.  He wondered at that, especially when the interview ended with Jon Snow not having made a clear decision about Jaime’s disposition here in the North.  The man’s eyes were still, his face cold, his questions pointed and probing and ranging far beyond just Jaime’s break with Cersei and her plans.  He asked about Jaime’s acquaintance with Rhaegar Targaryen, his service under Aerys, his knowledge of the Hand’s death that started a sequence of history-changing events, of the Sparrows and the stance of various Houses and powers and how they might array in the coming war. 

Finally, he asked about Bran.

Jaime’s eyes fell to the floor at that, but though the words were couched in shame, he admitted to the truth of what he’d done. Daenerys’s face grew hard and still as she listened to the tale.  Jon’s was a picture in barely restrained fury.  After Jaime stopped talking, Jon gestured him out of his presence with a harsh jerk of his chin.  Jaime exited the small hearing room with a tight sensation of anxiety in his chest.  And there Brienne was, finally.  He hadn’t even known how acutely he’d felt her absence until he saw her. Their eyes met, briefly.   Hers seemed to search his face for something.  He nodded to her and wondered what it was that she saw there.

She brushed by him and entered the room he’d exited without a word.  Jaime paused to frown at the closed door.  He turned to head on about his business, but it was not as if he had much of that.  In the end, he stood there and awaited her.

In a matter of less than 10 minutes she exited the room.  Jaime’s folded arms dropped in surprise. She paused to see him but didn’t share his reaction.  Her frame was loose, her shoulders as at ease as they ever were.  Jaime felt something inside himself uncoil. She gestured her head to motion him down the corridor with her.

“King Jon has decided not to question his sister’s decision,” she voiced over her shoulder as he fell in behind her.

“And how much of that had to do with you?” Jaime murmured to her back.  It itched at his back, that a decision on which his very life hung had been made without his presence. 

Brienne halted, and did a quarter-turn towards him.  He angled as far toward her as he could. The walls here were too close for more than one person to fit through at a time.  It was a very old and somewhat claustrophobic part of the castle.  Brienne’s bulk made it seem even smaller, but somehow, also – what?  What was this he was feeling?  There was a sensation of hominess, of soft comfort, that he’d not before felt even when he was at home.  “I told him that I tested you,” she said, angling her chin down so that she could meet his eyes in these close quarters, “and that you passed.”

Jaime blinked.  They were really very close to each other.  He could smell her, hear her breaths, nearly feel them on his face …

He cleared his throat. “Test?  Ah.”  Here was the reason that she’d told him of Jon’s parentage.  “If I were up here in the North spying, that bit of juicy news would have been enough to send me running back to Cersei’s –“ _arms_ “clutches with information.”  Hmm.  It was a measure of cleverness he’d frankly not expected from Brienne.

“You surprise me, my Lady.”  He murmured the words.  Perhaps she could feel his breath on her own skin, for her jaw muscles tightened.  She abruptly whirled away from him and lumbered off down the hall, speaking to him over her back again. “He has, as you know, what for him are greater concerns right now.  You are alive, at least until your story is confirmed or denied.”

Jaime nodded at her back.  She couldn’t see him, of course.  She grunted and changed the subject.  “Your brother is here.”

Their hallway T’d into a wider one, and he stepped up to her side.  He cocked his head. “Yes.  Leaving again immediately, due to the ill news I brought.”

She looked straight ahead.  “You’ll want to spend today with him, then.”  In her awkwardness, it came out almost as an order.  But all Jaime did was nod.  She wasn’t wrong.

 

 

Tyrion and Sansa and a squad of men were in the courtyard prepared to leave once again, an hour after sunrise the following morn.  Brienne was at Jaime’s side, this time, for reasons he couldn’t discern. 

“You’re not accompanying her?” He wondered.

Brienne shook her head.  “She wanted me here for a couple of reasons, but mostly” – she cut her eyes sideways at him – “to, she said, ‘sit on’ you if you try to run.”

Hah.  Jaime nodded slowly.  She’d be staying here, where he was - that was good. Just … good.

Before mounting up onto his specialized saddle, Tyrion looked over to the two of them.  Unexpectedly for Jaime, it was Brienne with whom he made eye contact.  Tyrion jerked his head off to the side.  Jaime watched, riven with curiosity, as they stepped out of hearing distance.  The lady warrior bent, then finding too much height differential still existed for true ease of conversation, knelt.  Tyrion, who had already begun to speak, paused to take this in.  He slanted a glance toward Jaime, who couldn’t restrain a smirk.  Tyrion's face was that of a man who did not know whether to be charmed or offended.  But he turned back to Brienne and  seemed to be starting over with whatever he had to say.

Whatever he said made Brienne jerk her chin down and frown fiercely.  It was a reaction that brought a smile to Tyrion’s face.  She made a short reply.  Tyrion shrugged.  He said something else, and Brienne stilled.  After a moment, she replied.  Jaime tried to lipread but had never had that skill to his brother’s level.

Brienne stood, and backed off, and Jaime walked to his brother.  He did not hug him.  He did go so far as to clasp his shoulder.  “Don’t die,” he told him firmly, gruffly. 

Tyrion shook his head.  “Me? It’s you who will likely be at war before I return.  _You_ , don’t die.” He frowned and cleared his throat and turned away.

Jaime asked Brienne, as the horse’s rumps receded beyond Winterfell’s walls.  “What did Tyrion want?”

She glanced down at him, unsmiling and he could tell, uncomfortable.  “To be sure you are taken care of.”

Taken care of?  Jaime blinked.  “What does that mean?”

Brienne scowled.  “You will have to ask him.”


	8. Preparing for War

While awaiting the return of Sansa Stark and Tyrion Lannister, and more tensely the advance of the wight horde, most of the Winterfell’s denizens kept very busy. They were hunting.  They were building a strange indoor garden of plants which, Jaime was told, required little to no sunlight with warm water running below its floor.  Despite the surprise of the warm water – whoever had heard of a hot spring in these climes? - Jaime was skeptical of the enterprise – whoever had heard of a plant that needed no sun?  But it was consuming large amounts of manpower.  Aside from that, others were drying and salting meat and other foodstuffs for storage and creating large and numerous indoor chicken coops, bunny hutches, and the like.  All of those and the garden were being constructed outside Winterfell’s proper walls: more laborers were employed constructing tall earthenworks reinforced with stone around the space.  Whole rooms were full of people bending over furs and thick linens and woolens, furiously stitching winter-worthy clothing for the Dothraki and Unsullied armies who had none and some of whom had already fallen victim to the cold. Out past Winterfell’s walls hunting bands roved and scouted, and acres of forest were slowly being cleared to add to already-huge stockpiles of wood. 

The mass of people who needed these goods was overwhelming, though.  Certainly a lot of them would die under the Night King’s advance, but they would be trying to stop that.  It was toward that end that Jaime went to Sansa the night before she left and pleaded to be allowed to send messages out to the army that had once followed his command, and to former allies he thought might rally to him and the fight for life.  Sansa granted her permission so coolly he thought that her blood must be made of snow runoff. But she granted it.  He sent them almost as soon as Tyrion and she rode away.

Jaime and Brienne were put to work just like everyone else.  Walkers were through the Wall, and though their Southern advance had inexplicably halted a few miles inside Winterfell’s demesne, that couldn’t last for long.  All the preparation for the Long Night would be for naught if the Walkers and their wights could not be fought off.  Jaime and Brienne taught sword art that next day, all day long, to those who in ordinary times would never lift a finger to it – the old, the infirm, the young. 

The very young.  Sending his most recent student off to his meal, Jaime watched Brienne with a girl who’d approached claiming to have nine summers, who Jaime doubted had more than seven.  The Lady Arya – ‘Lady’ seemed a misnomer there but he had no better title – had been in the training yard and intervened when Brienne would have turned the youngster away.  “You don’t know who’ll be with her to fight for her, or not, when the White Walkers come,” Arya had advised earnestly, and it was enough to move Brienne to nod and begin the girl’s training. 

Brienne stopped the thrust of the girl’s short wooden sword to make an adjustment to the set of her shoulders.  She was brisk and matter of fact and the girl took it in stride.  Unbidden, an image of Cersei rose in Jaime’s mind, one of the few times he’d been near her with one of the children. Myrcella, perhaps a year old.  She’d taken a tumble down a few stairs and had been howling as though serious injury had been done, though clearly it had not.  Cersei had been all hugs and kisses, rocking and murmuring “there, there, darling”.  A familiar grief pressed behind Jaime’s eyes at the thought of the sweet daughter he’d lost before he’d even begun to know her. Myrcella had been soft in a way this child was not.  Watching Brienne’s manner with the girl, he wondered how much of Myrcella’s pliability had been due to Cersei’s maternal methods.  If Brienne had the raising of a child, ‘soft’ was not how he imagined any such child turning out.

A group of men entered the yard, and Jaime turned toward them, expecting more students.  These, though, were foot soldiers, returning from hunting, tired but likely expected to train at least a bit before going to their rationed suppers. They noticed Brienne, walking a circle around the young girl who followed her progress with the tip of her foreshortened training sword.  Jaime tensed, expecting the rough derisive talk he’d heard down South, when people thought he was out of hearing: ‘Kingslayer’s Whore’, ‘Maiden-no-More’, and other even less catchy labels.  This group, though, had none of that.  Instead, when a few of them laid eyes on Jaime, it was barely restrained mutters about him.  “Lady-Knight’s Man-Whore”, he heard at least that, distinctively.

His first, unguarded response to that was a vivid image of himself, playing out the duties such a position would require.  He took a deep breath and shoved it away.  This wasn’t the first time he’d heard insalubrious titles appended to him, generally with callous laughter, as though there were any wit in them. More, this particular type of deprecation had been happening since he’d been wearing Brienne’s cloak.  And, well, it wasn’t as if he was going to stop wearing it – in this weather, it would mean his life.  Such cloaks were in deathly short supply.

The men trained half-heartedly for three quarters of an hour, and then tromped out of the yard.  Twilight was on them in full.  The young girl was gone, too, and Brienne sheathed her sword.  She wasn’t breathing hard.  Neither was he.  It had been slow work, all day, training those who would at their best never have the speed or grace of either of them.

Suddenly, Jaime wanted that.  The speed, the grace, the clash, the thrusting, the parrying. 

“I challenge you!” he called across the yard, before she could leave.  She turned to him, questioning, and he tapped his sheathed sword as he walked to her.  Her hand dropped to her hilt as she watched him come.  Perhaps she wanted it, too.

She nodded when he was close enough to see.  Foolishness, this; there was only waning twilight and the rising of a half-moon to give them light.  They both had dulled swords, though, and were experts at what they did.  And Jaime’s heart was already quickening with excitement at the prospect of reliving a version of their fight on the bridge so long ago.

That fight had been interrupted.  They should finish what was between them.  His blood sang to the music her sword made when it cleared leather just after his.

She swung first, and he allowed himself a tight grin.  She wasn’t uneager, then. He parried, circled, then thrust.  She met it with ease, her face a mask of frowning concentration.  _Maid no more_ rang in his ears, and then, _Lady-Knight’s Man-Whore,_ in vulgar rhyme like a drinking song.  Brienne shifted her grip on her haft and the motion was, in that moment, suggestive to him of movements of another kind.  He watched her fingers and then lifted his eyes to hers, narrowed in the dim light, but catching glints of moonlight as did her blade.  She moved so well, and suddenly was inside his guard, because he wasn’t paying attention.  Or rather, he was paying attention to the wrong things.

But at such times, a metal hand could be an advantage – he used it to catch and turn aside the point of her sword.  Gold was soft and there would be a mark left there, he knew.  But her gasp of outrage made it worth it.  He grinned at her over their leveled blades, as thoroughly present in this moment as was possible. She was so much woman, and so much a part of his past and of who he was becoming.  He wondered if she knew.  He wondered why she was here with him, now.

“Why did you bring me your cloak that night on the road?” Jaime’s voice broke the fraught silence that till then had held only their labored breaths and the metal percussion of their weapons.  His heartbeat and breaths were up, pulsing life-giving blood through his body.  It was exhilarating, the sweetest thing in his life now, an opportunity to spar with a worthy opponent.

Or nearly the sweetest thing.

Brienne cut a narrow glance at him, sideways, and then spun suddenly to meet his incoming blade. “You, as much as your horse, weren’t bred for this type of cold.” Her chest rose and fell quickly under the practice leathers, though she was far from tired. She was flushed, her eyes light, her movements grace and efficiency which belied the size of her body.

He backed off briefly and tried a different angle, feinted, then tried to cut in under her swing – but she turned it in mid-air with impressive strength and brought it down to cut him off.  He felt it down to his bones, that abrupt halt to his weapon’s path.

“You’re an islander by breeding,” he countered, catching her attack with the flat of his blade and thrusting it aside.  Time was, he wouldn’t have been able to do that.  “No more made for this weather than I.”

“Perhaps not, but I’ve been North for some time now.  I’ve grown accustomed.  And I had another.”  She grunted with the effort of pushing him off and away from her.  He danced in a semi-circle and she followed, hunting a way inside his guard again.

“Still,” he harried, unable to let the subject go now that he’d dared raise it, “it wasn’t as though you had to do it – I probably would have survived until I could kill enough animals to have one made for myself.  People recognized that cloak, you know.  The color pattern of the fur.  It’s started some – talk.”  Turned previous talk on itself, rather.  “So I just … wondered why you went ahead and did it anyway.”

“You think I care for TALK?” Brienne snapped with a curled lip, but something was off in her focus, now, and he made a successful sally past her defenses.  His dulled tip poked at her left side.  She batted it aside, a frustrated motion, and he smiled his satisfaction while backing off again.

“Perhaps more than you let on, on that particular topic,” Jaime dared.  She swung at him, but it was emotionally driven, and he deflected easily.  Her breaths were more rapid, now, but she wasn’t really working any harder.  Not physically anyway.  He feinted again and slid inside her guard, but stepped in nearer than sword’s length.  She gave a short exclamation and tried to back off. He suddenly couldn’t allow that, the dodging.  He dropped the hilt of his practice sword, not marking the plop of it landing on the cold hard ground, and used his single hand to grab a fistful of the leather at the base of his opponent’s throat to hold her still.  It was more effective than he’d expected: she froze utterly.  His knuckles curved up over the jerkin’s edge and brushed the lighter cloth covering the place where her clavicles met.

It was rare that he intentionally touched her.  Perhaps, it had just been that once at Harrenhal when he quelled her defensive impulses.  All other times, it had only ever been her touching him.  Catching him when he fainted.  Hauling him out of mud.  Cleaning his own vomit off him.  Shoving food into his hand.

Brienne shifted, and he tensed, but then he felt her arm move out to the side as she dropped her own practice sword.  Heart still pounding despite their sudden stillness, Jaime kept his hold tight, looking up into Brienne’s face until finally she glared down at him.

“Tell me why,” he demanded again.

“Jaime,” she huffed, and he blinked at the loss of the ‘Ser’, “it was hospitable.  It’s what people do!”

This wasn’t like her.  He took a deep breath and found within himself a wondering stillness at her evasion.

His hand loosened its hold on her clothing, but stayed, and she didn’t move away from it.

“Brienne,” he returned more calmly, perhaps even softly now.  His fist, perhaps, was now just resting against her chest. And perhaps his tongue savored the feel of her name on it.  “For hospitality, people find the spares, the leftovers, to share.  Even for a guest, an acquaintance, a – a friend – “ for despite how long they had known one another, ‘friend’ was a dangerous word for the likes of them – “they do that.  They DON’T give their very best from off their own back.”

She looked off to the distance for a brief second, swallowing.  He was close enough to hear it.  Close enough to feel her pulse beating in the hollow of her throat, as frenetically as his still was.  Close enough to smell her, and she smelled like a woman.

It was his turn to swallow, hard.

“You were cold!” she finally burst out.  And before his frown at what sounded like a non-answer could more than start, Brienne raised both her hands to his chest and shoved.  He wasn’t expecting it, and staggered back a step, letting go of her.  “You were cold,” she continued as though she choked on the words, but her eyes were now holding something that was the opposite of the push away she’d just given him.  “And I did not want you to be.”

While he stood blinking, she turned on her heel and stalked away.

 

Brienne hated that her pulse took so long to slow, and that all she had to do was recall the movement of Jaime’s knuckles against her chest for it to speed up once more.  She sat freshly bathed and clothed in flickering firelight on the trunk at the end of her bed in the small cell room she used, palms flat on her knees, feet braced against the floor as though she might have to spring into violence at any moment.  _They don’t give their very best from off their own back._  What a sad statement.  Perhaps where he was from people didn’t do that.  Where she was from they did.  Especially for those who were … important to them.

Well. No point in continuing that line of thought.  Utter waste of time.  What was between herself and Jaime – SER Jaime – was something.  She felt no need to define it or examine it, she just knew that it was there, and she knew he knew as well.  She also knew the thing could not take on any shape besides the one it now had.  Talking about it, as he perhaps had been trying to do, was an exercise in futility.  But his eyes – how many times had his eyes shown her his soul, as he watched her leaving him?  How many times had they met hers over the heads of other people, and they’d shared some … some … some THING?

‘Thing’ was such a miserly word.

Meeting rarely, or even travelling together but with road tasks to occupy them, the _thing_ had grown but verbal acknowledgement hadn’t been needed.  Glances and looks, nods and bows, gifts of armor and a name, gifts of honor and support, were how they acted on the thing and how it caused them to act.  Brienne knew this, and had needed no more.

Now – now, if she was needing more, that was just – too bad.  She lurched to her feet.  What more was there, after all? Jaime held a particular place in her regard, affected her mind and soul in ways no one else did or had.  Further, she knew without doubt that she mattered to him.  Was _special_ to him, in a way few others in his life were.

 _That_ was the ‘thing’.  Years ago she’d found, all unexpectedly, someone who would die for her.  More, he would die ignominiously, unwisely and futilely, in a bear pit as incidental entertainment. Whatever and whyever that was, it was too precious a thing, and wasn’t something she’d risk out of wanting anything lesser. Like physical expressions of desire.  Like fucking.  Those weren’t known to her, but she still knew that what was between Jaime and herself was infinitely more precious than that.

Besides, the image of what Jaime found physically desirable was clear in Brienne’s mind: cool, ethereal Cersei, elegant and ladylike, beautiful even among beauties.  Brienne would never again make such a fool of herself as to reveal to a handsome man that she had given any thought to his physical form, or touch.  Much the less, if the man was Jaime.

She wouldn’t.  The turmoil in her soul stilling as she found that knowledge in herself, Brienne paced to her door, opened it, and went through it with her shoulders re-accustoming themselves to their typical determined set.

 

The short, simple words that Brienne had uttered wouldn’t leave Jaime’s mind that day.  He didn’t know why, at first.  On the surface, they were nothing more than deflection, which frustrated him.  For the first time since he’d know her she was being less than forthright.  Why?  He’d never gotten the impression that she was afraid of anything that was between them.

But then, as he was using his golden hand to steady his meat so his left could saw a chunk off it, it occurred to him that perhaps she was being direct, after all.  That perhaps his own convoluted mind, too accustomed to the hidden truths and outright lies that were his own sorry family’s breath and life, was trying to make of her statement what it was not.

“You were cold,” she’d said, “and I did not want you to be.”

She’d seen his discomfort – his danger, in these frigid temperatures – and cared about it.  Nothing more complex, but nothing less profound than that. She had cared about him, and then actively cared for him.  By giving him her best. Which from what he’d seen, once she decided to give, was always what she gave.  Her best.

Who else in his life had ever done likewise?  Truly, no one in his remembrance.  Would his mother have, once? There was no way to know.

Brienne came into the hall a few moments later, and seeing him alone in a corner, brought her own supper over to him.  Seated herself across from him.  She met his genuine smile with a frown.  It made him laugh, which made her sniff disdainfully.

It was a good ending to a day that had been far better than he deserved, really.


	9. Heading to Braavos - Tyrion and Sansa: Interlude 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These two just sneaked in here, unexpectedly.

Sansa had been riding at Tyrion’s side for days now, in the company of a mix of her Northmen and Daenerys’s Unsullied, adjusting to never really being out of the freezing cold. Small as Tyrion was, and Southerner though he was, he never seemed to shiver.  She wondered at that, idly, with a mind that for a rarity had one very narrow plan on which to focus and hours of time for dwelling on anything besides their destination.  Often, those thoughts turned to this man that she had not seen for years, and had last done so under terrible circumstances.

Once it was decided at Winterfell that Sansa and Tyrion would be the envoys to the Iron Bank and then - if they had the means afterward - the Golden Company, Brienne had approached her.  She’d asked whether Sansa wouldn’t need a woman along, especially a woman who could protect her.   Sansa had sighed.  “Thank you for your care, Brienne. Perhaps if Daenerys was sending any of those Dothraki along.  But she’s sending eunuchs.”  Brienne had firmed her shoulders, and Sansa had nodded, knowing her objection.  “I am more certain of my safety with Tyrion at my side than I am with any other man excepting Jon or Bran.  I will be as safe as is possible. You stay and watch Jaime.  Report anything odd about him to Jon.”

Brienne had pursed her lips.  “ _Much_ about him is odd, my lady.” 

Sansa had looked closely, then couldn’t help a small smile.  “A joke, Brienne!  You surprise me.”

She, Tyrion, and their band of men approached the port, finally, from which they would sale to Braavos.  They’d been able to purchase berths on a ship for all of them.  After that, they were just about out of money excepting what they would need for their return, should proceedings at the Iron Bank not go well.

Once they had boarded, and Sansa had stowed away the small number of personal items she’d brought with her, she went looking for Tyrion.  She found him in a side companionway near stowage, where he had just finished giving instructions to the Unsullied who were to keep strict guard over a certain small crate they had brought with them.  In the narrow passage there was no room to find a way to even out their height levels.  She stood looking down, while he looked up.  But at least they were in relative privacy.  Sansa had already realized this was difficult to come by on a ship.

“I am wondering what you plan to say to the Bank representative,” Sansa told Tyrion.

Tyrion crossed his arms and cocked his head to the side.  It was an expression Sansa recalled from their long-ago marriage.  It brought memories that, in hindsight, caused a flush of shame to Sansa for how her younger self had behaved toward him.  With older eyes and a mind that had endured true horror at the hands of a spouse, she could see how Tyrion had done his best towards her.  Despite his family, despite that maid Shae, despite everything.  She’d never told him she was sorry.  But to be honest with herself, recalling Tyrion’s strange kindnesses toward her back then was something that helped tip Sansa toward accepting Brienne’s vouching for Jaime Lannister.  Tyrion’s reputation as an alcohol-guzzling, double-dealing, womanizing little monster had truthful aspects to it, and yet he was capable of being a good man.  Might another Lannister, though of much worse reputation, have the same hidden quality?  She thought it possible enough that she was willing to give Brienne a chance.

“I’m still considering all the ways the conversation could go,” Tyrion told her.  “I’ve not met this Tycho Nestoris.  I am going off my father’s descriptions.  Some of it will be judging who he is and how he is reacting, in the moment.”

Sansa nodded.  This she well understand.  “But what do you think – I know right now it’s just a guess – of our chances of swaying him?”

Tyrion sighed.  He leaned back against the wall, and feeling the fatigue of their days on horseback, Sansa shifted beside him to mimic him.  She was always so _on_ – holding up her noble, even stern mask for her people.  It wasn’t fake: most of the time she did feel stern and cool, even cold.  But Tyrion knew her from such a long time ago, and it had been under such intimate circumstances.  Even the lack of consummation of their marriage – everything between the two of them was so personal.  He had never once betrayed that. And she didn’t have that many people with whom she could relax her guard.  She wished, for a moment, that Arya was making this trip with her.  But if anyone had proven to her that they would not retaliate if she let down some of her emotional walls, wasn’t it this man? 

Tyrion tipped his head against the wall, which tilted his chin up and he was able to meet her downward gaze.  “Right now, my guess would be ‘not good’.  It will not be easy to convince anyone across the sea of ancient legends coming to life.”  
  
“Even there, though, the daylight must be shorter,” Sansa offered.  She hesitated, but her knees were tired, and she just wanted – something.  She didn’t know what.  But she bent them, and slowly slid down the wall until she was crouched there, next to Tyrion.  His eyes were warm like tea, tracking her face as it came nearer his.  When she stopped moving, it felt almost as if she couldn’t move her gaze.  His was steady, and soft in a way that was familiar but that she had never recognized until now.  The moment stretched between them, while Sansa took shallow breaths that were barely audible. 

Then she blinked, and he looked away.

 _What was that?_   Sansa glanced at the wooden bulkhead across from them.

“Is there,” she finally said, when it seemed Tyrion had nothing to make the silence between them less awkward, “anything I can do to help you prepare?”  For they both knew he would be the voice of their alliance.  Sansa was there to assert the truth that Jon and Daenerys were indeed allied and that the fate of Westeros – and who knew, perhaps the rest of the world as well – hung very much in the balance.  Sansa was not and would never be a diplomat, and surely diplomacy was what was called for, when trying to deal with the Iron Bank from such a disadvantage.  She was, however, becoming rather adept at strategy.

Tyrion frowned.  “Listen, I suppose.  If I need someone to bounce ideas off, you could be that person.  When we meet with the representative – follow my lead.  I can signal you to speak, to stop speaking, to change tactics, to interrupt me when _I’m_ speaking.”

Sansa nodded slowly.  “I can do that.”

“Excellent.”  Once more, Tyrion seemed to have run out of words.  So unusual, from what she’d observed of him with others.  But between the two of them – in the past, it had happened.

Sansa let the quiet stretch, this time.  She had something to say but did not know how to begin.  Eventually, she just started with that.

“There has long been something I desired to say to you, should I encounter you again under circumstances that would allow me to say it.”

Tyrion quirked an eyebrow at her, but his face remained serious, taking her tone and not making a mockery of it.  “And here are just such circumstances, my lady.”

Sansa cleared her throat.  “Yes.”  She paused, marshalling thoughts, before speaking again.  “You were _good_ to me, during our marriage, my lord.  I was too foolish and naïve to see it at the time.  You were better to me than anyone in that cursed city.  And I – I realized it too late.  If I had known sooner, understood better - but, thank you.  Thank you for your kindness, and forbearance, and integrity back then.  And I am sorry.”

Tyrion was staring, his eyes roving her face as she talked.  She saw him swallow.  At her last sentence, though, he frowned.  “For what, precisely, are you sorry?”

Sansa shook her head, memories of that horrible day crowding in.  “I did not treat you nearly so well.  In the end, I deserted you.  I did not intend the consequences that had for you, but I trusted whom I should not have, and I opened myself to all manner of … horror …” now she swallowed.  “I deserted you, when you most needed someone to stand by you, and when you had stood by me in every way that you could.  And I have regretted it, now, for years.”  Her voice had gotten very quiet, by the end, as she pushed words out past a constriction in her throat.  She had not laid bare her feelings like this, not even with her family, in her adult life.  It did not come easily.  But it was just, that Tyrion hear these words from her.

Tyrion did not rush to speak, though he shook his head minutely while he processed what she’d said.

“My Lady,” he finally responded, and his voice rasped a bit, “you have no cause to apologize to me.  My entire family treated you – and yours – abominably.  You had no cause to expect decency from any of us, least of all the half-man to whom you were wed against your will.  You did as well under the circumstances as could be expected of anyone.  You are a woman of incredible tenacity and virtue, with intelligence and beauty as well.  I am glad you’ve become who you have.   Let us leave it at that, shall we?”  He quirked his little half-grin at her, trying to lighten the mood, and it was charming in its innate self-deprecation.  But, no, she would not have that.

“I do not like that term,” she told him with her own frown.  “I don’t use it any more.  I’d rather you didn’t.”  Not until the words had left her lips did she recall that she had no rightful influence over how he spoke or what words he used.

Tyrion frowned again, bemused.  “What term?”

“’Half-man’.  It is … not accurate.” 

He now looked amused, instead, casting a mock-assessing glance down at his body. “No?  It is a common term, and commonly conceived to be accurate in my case.  My own family calls me so.”

“Your family,” Sansa asserted, “are mostly evil cunts.”

Tyrion cracked out surprised laughter, loud in their enclosed space.  “Of those left alive,” he murmured, “I’d say half.  Half of them are, gender aside.”  But he did not let the issue drop.  If anything, he leaned closer to her.   “Please,” he asked, and Sansa knew it wasn’t an easy word for him, “why do you disallow this term’s application to my - you must admit, short! - self?”

Sansa shook her head, feeling a flush of embarrassment, of belated timidity at perhaps having opened herself too fully to a man, no matter their history, and one she had not seen in years until very recently.  But she’d started, and she wouldn’t withdraw now.  “I have now had many men in my life, in one manner of knowing or another.  And whatever your stature,” she made sure to gather his eyes into her own as she said the words, wanting him to know how very much she meant them, “you are more a man than most of them could ever even pretend to be.”

Her legs were beginning to have a pins-and-needles feeling, and she had revealed more of herself in this one conversation than in any other of her adult life up until now, and his _eyes_ – Tyrion’s eyes held a world of softness and fierceness and guardedness and disbelief and hope, and she was suddenly frightened.  So she rose her feet, and before he could gather any words, left him there on his own.


	10. Conversing by Firelight

For reasons no one understood, the wight army seemed entrenched for the time being.  Small roving bands such as the one they’d fought on the way up the King’s Road were at times sent out over the countryside, and so dragon-glass armed bands of the living went out from Winterfell as well, trying to protect what they could of the roads and gather information on the Night King’s possible movements.  Perhaps, Jaime heard speculation, the King was attempting to gather information of his own.  The weather had stayed as well; whether this was related to the army stalling its advance was hotly debated amongst the Maesters. But despite the unexpected reprieve from large-scale battle, Winter was still here, and full-out war with the Walkers was inevitable.  Anyone who could hold a sword worked at that skill, as did he and Brienne.  In between teaching others, they trained.  They trained hard, and Jaime was pleased to come much nearer to besting Brienne than he would have a year ago. 

Afterward, they were often still together, cleaning and sharpening weapons by firelight in one of the lesser common rooms. On one such evening, no one else was there.  The fire was small due to wood rationing, and the room almost cool enough to be uncomfortable.  The silence was – comfortable, in a homey kind of way that was new to Jaime.  He was conscious of an appreciation for his companion, and a bit of curiosity at the frequency with which she happened into his vicinity, these past days at Winterfell.  As his surety, was she ascertaining that he wouldn’t run off and leave her life forfeit? His hand stilled on the bit of oiled cloth that he was rubbing down the length of his sword as he looked at her.  Brienne was using a quill brush to probe gently into the lines of Oathkeeper’s decorative haft and clean there.  With whom had she spent this time, before he arrived? His throat constricted, a little, at her bird’s nest hair bent over her task.  It was something of a wonder, to be here with her.  And he wondered how long he could have it.  Despite the odd sense of belonging that he had during these quiet moments by her side, he did not expect that he would ever find real acceptance here in Stark territory. She, though, was in her element.

“I wonder how it will go for King Jon, once this news of his parentage is out.”  Brienne rarely initiated conversation, and so this break in their quiet surprised Jaime. 

“I don’t know,” he mused.  “But it’s Winter.  The Great War and the Long Night are as good as on us.  These Northmen might have quarreled with him at other times in history, but in this one, how can they?  They’ve no other options. And without a leader, they’ll die.”

Brienne grunted. Even that sound, he knew, he would miss whenever he had to move on.  “They’ll die anyway,” she groused, “most if not all of them.  But I wonder how he feels.  He’s been loyal to the Starks his whole life, and now to find out that the man who raised him partook in his true family’s ruin.”

Jaime felt his jaw clench.  Familial loyalty – his truest virtue for most of his life, and he had finally discarded even that one.  He didn’t know who he was, now.  Or the meaning of the person he had been.  The one he chose to discard, when he left behind Cersei and her treachery and chose to follow his own vow.  Could he be true to it? Was he capable?  It seemed Brienne thought he was – was that why she was here with him?  Aside from having volunteered to stand as his surety?  That was a move that still caused that strange humbled sensation inside him. He didn’t know, and the not-knowing was more than frustrating.  It was beginning to haunt him. He cleared his throat.  She’d answered him honestly the last time he’d asked such a question, after all.

“Brienne.”

She didn’t look up, engrossed in her work.  “Hmm?”  
  
Jaime swallowed.  He leaned forward over the sword in his lap. His voice was quiet, and perhaps just a bit husky.  “Why did you give yourself as my surety?”

Brienne’s hands paused in their stroking.  She stared intently down at them.

Jaime was still, watching her.  It seemed he had no shortage of these ‘why’ questions for her.  This time he craved her answer, with a desperation that used to be reserved for Cersei’s touch.

“You’re alive.  What does it matter?” Brienne finally tossed back at him, her tone challenging. 

 He could feel his jaw muscles clenching as he stared at her, daring her to return his gaze.  If he wanted honesty from her, he owed it to her.  “It matters to me.   I had wondered … after our talk on the road here … ”  he wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence.

She cleared her throat, slowly running the quill brush into the stylized crevices of Oathkeeper’s Lannister lion’s mane. He watched her do so, remembered how she swung that sword, and suddenly experienced  a surging satisfaction that, Stark-aligned though she be, whenever she waged war she did so carrying the sigil of _his_ house.  In a way, when she went into battle, she did so with her hand wrapped around … him.

He swallowed.  “It’s no minor gesture, to stand someone’s surety.  If there is no trust on your part, it’s risky.”

She tilted her chin up imperiously.  “’ _You need trust to have a truce’,”_ she recited at him, and then cut her blue gaze at him sideways. 

His own lips tilted upward. “You’ve gotten to where you can read my thoughts, wench.”  His voice was soft and infused with the warmth he was feeling.  That moment in the Harrenhal bath indeed had been the memory in his mind. 

Brienne turned her whole head now, not just her eyes, in his direction.  “You are wondering if I vouched for you because I trusted you.”

“Yes.” The question – the hope! – burned in him.

Now, she rotated her entire body on its stool to him.  Her hands on her sword were still.  He had deserted his work moments ago, when he asked the question.  They sat there, intent on each other.

Brienne’s gaze was steady on his.  “On that day when I spoke to Lady Stark – and before that, when I told you the truth of King Jon’s parentage – and perhaps before that.  I may not know what you will do to others, and I spoke true when I told you that was a test, but mostly I was testing the validity of my own instincts. I did … trust that you would not betray _me_.”

Jaime felt his brow furrowing in concentration as he listened to her words, and the husk in her voice.  She didn’t trust his actions towards people who were not here, but somehow she did trust him for herself.  Trusted enough, even, to tell him so, a knowledge that he could so easily use unscrupulously to his own advantage, if he chose. The room was suddenly very close, and his throat was constricting.  Heat prickled around the back of his head near his ears.

There was _not_ any moisture standing in his eyes.  Well, not much anyway.  He’d been despicable to others, he’d earned no trust in that department.  But to her, yes – it was true that to Brienne, he had to the best of his ability kept every word given, and never once dealt falsely with her.

Only with her.

“I still do,” she added, as if to make it crystal clear that – with whatever caveat - she did indeed _trust_ him in this.

Brienne’s breaths were coming quickly and with enough effort that Jaime could see them from where he sat.  He wanted very suddenly to be closer to her, much closer, but it seemed to him that the delicacy of this moment that mattered so to him would not stand against his movement.  So he sat very still, holding it as long as possible, not wanting to shatter it.

It was Brienne who did so.

“Is that what you wanted to know?” She asked, her voice as soft as he had ever heard it.

“Yes,” he whispered, because that was all he could force through his throat, and she heard him because she nodded.  She gave him that close-mouthed, tip-cornered unassuming smile, and returned to her labor.

He did too, after a time, long slow movements in a room that despite its coolth was warm, warm.


	11. Dealing with the Iron Bank - Tyrion and Sansa: Interlude 2

The small cabins they’d been able to afford below deck seemed to stifle Sansa.  At least, she spent as much of her time out of hers and above as she could.  Tyrion was, too; he found that the less they had each day of actual daylight, the more he craved being in it.

Sansa was in fact out in the open air when they approached the Titan of Braavos and the lagoon’s opening which he guarded.  Tyrion saw her there as he strode up onto deck.  They hadn’t interacted much, since that talk in the companionway which had seemed … loaded, with their history, but also with emotion and perhaps, still, things they weren’t saying.  For all his facility with words, Tyrion didn’t know what should be said, either.  But he approached her side, out in the sun and the breeze that was moving them toward their destination.  The two of them stood staring up as they grew nearer and nearer to the granite fortress.  Tyrion eventually afforded Sansa a glance.  _More of a man._   The sound of her voice had echoed in his ears at night, and took up more of his thought space during the day than it should.

“What do you think?” he asked, gesturing upward.  As they began to sail under the green bronze armored skirt, he trained his eyes that way once more, curious as whether the architects had bothered with anatomical accuracy under there. 

Sansa flicked a glance up, but then turned her gaze forward into the lagoon as they entered it.  “Rather impressive,” Tyrion observed, twisting to look behind them as they made it past the Titan.

Sansa didn’t bother with another look.  When Tyrion glanced toward her face again, it was as still as ever – as regal as ever – but with an added coldness that he’d not yet seen reside there.  He stilled, seeing it.

“It’s meant to impress,” Sansa replied, finally, and the chill in her voice almost made him shiver even in his warm robes.  “People who build so – they are trying to intimidate others.  In my experience, those who feel the need to be so obvious about their power are bullies.”

Bullies.  Tyrion cocked his head, glancing back over his shoulder for one last view before turning his back on the Titan.  “Perhaps you’re right,” he murmured.  He didn’t know exactly what Sansa had been through, since leaving him.  But she’d been in the company of Littlefinger, and then married off to Ramsey Bolton.  What he knew personally of the former, and the reputation of the later, made him set his back teeth against each other to tamp down on the anger and – some other emotion – that rose within.  He let the silence ride for a bit.  He wanted to converse, to _connect_ , with this woman – with his former spouse.  But there was so much that could be said, that was wrong, in response to such a statement.

“Bullies,” he murmured softly after a while.  Sansa’s tight lips thinned even further.  “Yes – there are far too many of those in the world, aren’t there?”

She finally let herself look down at him, again, and he made his face as soft as he knew how.  “My lady,” he began, but hesitated.  All his words had left him.  Then, with a memory in his head of a time before when she had accepted such a gesture, he reached deliberately for her hand.  Slowly, so that she had warning, and could withdraw if she chose.  Indeed, her whole arm stiffened, momentarily; but then, for a wonder, the fingers relaxed, splaying slightly in reaction as his reached them.  They were a bit rougher than they’d been when she was a girl; not quite as soft as could be expected of most ladies.  But she was from the North, and had been doing real work with those hands.  He curled his own stubby fingers around hers.  Loosely.  Gently. 

“Though I can certainly guess, I don’t know, exactly, what it is that you have endured.” Her fingers tensed, but only to tighten around his.  The feeling of her holding onto him, even that much – gods.  It did things inside his chest, and if he was completely honest, his loins.  Tyrion cleared his throat.  “When ideas of what if might have been like for you – how horrific it had to have been – occur to me, I can’t let them linger.  They make me so … they make me want to kill, again.  To murder, but slowly this time.  I hate”- he was speaking through his clenched teeth, and he stopped himself.  Sansa’s face was so hard, her jaw so tense.  She was staring straight ahead with eyes that clearly did not see the bay they were approaching.  It wasn’t helpful to her, to hear him talk about how her horror affected him.  _Take a different tack, you imbecile._ This was so important to him, and he was doing it so badly.

“I wish there were not such people in the world.  I wish you had never met any of them.  I wish … I wish I could have protected you.”  His throat seemed to close around that last sentence, and he didn’t think he could have forced out more words if he’d tried. 

The hand that held his was now griping so tightly that he was beginning to lose some circulation there. But she hadn’t pushed him away, hadn’t spurned him, hadn’t even let go of him.  He would not have lost that contact for a dozen kegs or a hundred whores.  He squeezed back, and did nothing else while Sansa stood just holding his hand and breathing.  She was almost a statue. 

“No one can protect anyone,” she finally responded.  But she still did not release his hand.  He let his breath out through his lips, slowly.  He didn’t find a need to answer. He just stood there, at her side. They were still standing that way, silent but connected, when their ship came quietly gliding into dock.

 

They’d arrived, sought and found mid-priced lodging, and confirmed their appointment time with Tycho Nestoris.  Finally they made the journey through the streets to the Iron Bank.  Coming up on its grand façade, Tyrion tipped his head back just as he’d done at the Titan.  Next to him, Sansa did the same, briefly, and then looked down to him.  She quirked an eyebrow at him, and he couldn’t help a chuckle.  “Bullies?” he asked, waving a hand at the edifice that was, indeed, imposing.  She nodded, sharply.

And then she smiled.  A smile he had not seen in … ever, he thought, and for a moment he forgot to keep walking. But she continued, queenly in her stride, and he hurried to catch up.

Inside, a guard made the lone Northman who’d accompanied them open the smallish crate he carried.  The man, whose name was Eustace, obliged.  The guard stood staring, head tipped down and mouth open, for a full minute before looking up at the man, his face paler by a shade. “Is that …” he didn’t finish the question, but the Northman nodded grimly.  “Shut it,” the guard commanded hastily, but waved them on through.  They were guided to a large, marbled room with tall, thick pillars around a solid table backed by three chairs so large they were almost small thrones.  The room matched the building.  Meant to intimidate, indeed.  Tyrion, though, had spent the whole of his life in settings that were overlarge for his stature.  He rather thought the intended effect might be lost on him.  And Sansa, he thought, as she walked calmly to a window to gaze out, had grown past the point where such mind tricks could work on her.

They waited awhile.  More tricks. When eventually Tycho Nestoris came, he was accompanied by a servant with tea service.  The banker seated himself and offered to Tyrion and Sansa seats on the benches arrayed before the table.  They accepted, and the servant set up and then poured the tea, afterwards disappearing into the shadows.  Eustace stood patiently, carefully holding his crate. It was all perfectly polite, but seemed perfunctory.  Going through the motions.  This did not bode well.  Tyrion took a sip from the steaming cup, nodded appreciation, then set it down.  He leaned in to the little table and regarded Nestoris almost unblinkingly. 

Nestoris folded his arms across his chest, sat firmly back against his seat, and regarded Tyrion.  Silence stretched.  After a few moments, Sansa rose and returned to the window she’d stood at before.  Gazing out with her back to the room, she said, “You’re losing the daylight here, too.”

Nestoris nodded, slowly.

Sansa took a moment more, looking out the window, but then turned back into the room.  Tyrion caught her eye: her face didn’t change but she glanced to Nestoris.  “In Westeros, the Maesters have begun to predict that if the Night King is not defeated, we will lose the light completely.  We will enter a time when no sun rises, at all. For years, and scores of years.”

Nestoris’s mouth turned down, in frank disbelief and a touch of disparagement.  Sansa saw and took the cue Tyrion sent her.  She moved to take a seat on the bench at Tyrion’s side.  “Of course,” she offered, leaning slightly forward with just a hint of sharing a confidence, “Even in Westeros, even those who’ve seen and fought the Night King, aren’t certain what to think of that.  But what does seem certain is that he and the length of the night are connected.  There are plants that won’t be growing, even in the amount of sunlight we still have.  We got here yesterday.  You’re at, what, about four hours total of sunlight each day? And we heard, on the street -your wise men are saying it too, that this Winter will be the longest and hardest in memory. There will be food shortages.  There will be people starving.  If Westeros’s crops fail, Essos -Braavos – will suffer. 

“I am an eminently sensible woman.  But even I believe this much.”

Her fingers tapped, on the bench between them.  Tyrion interjected.  “We are wondering how narrow a focus the Iron Bank – you - has.  Can you see long-range?  Make plans which will reap rewards, though not immediately?”

Nestoris smiled, softly but with an edge.  “Tell me what you want, and what you have to offer in return, and we shall see.”

“We want your political backing, to help inform your city of the danger it faces should Westerosi forces fail to contain the army of the dead.  We want your financial backing, to supply our forces with as much Valyrian steel and dragon glass as possible.  And, most of all, to secure the services of the Golden Company.”

“To my knowledge,” Nestoris purred, “the Golden Company is currently and for the foreseeable future employed.”

“Yes.  By my sister, with your funds.”

“And you want them instead, to …?”

“To help us fight these.”  Tyrion gestured Eustace over.  Nestoris watched him come, frowning.  The crate was placed on the table, and opened without much ceremony, other than Eustace holding a dragon glass blade out and at the ready.  The wight arm within, though, was securely fastened to the crate’s wooden interior.  Nestoris gazed on the thing, his lip curling in something akin to disgust.

“I’ve heard of a similar demonstration, played out for your sister.  A rather more dramatic one.”

Tyrion nodded.  “And one which, in the end, did not have the intended effect.  I’m hoping that you, sir, are a more sane person than my sister.”

“Sane how?”

“Look at this thing.” Tyrion used a gloved finger to prod, gingerly, at the dead fingers.  They reacted, reaching for him, trying to grab him. Nestoris jumped a little, at that.  Tyrion moved his hand away before his glove could be scratched through by one of those ragged fingernails.  The Maesters didn’t _think_ such a scratch would do anything to him.  He preferred not to run the risk.  “It’s from a wight that was captured, and dismembered, more than a month ago.  Its pieces have recently been disseminated all around Westeros, as part of a call for all available commanders and fighting men to rally to fight the horde of the dead that has, you may have heard, breached our Great Wall.  And yet it still moves, is still animated.  In Westeros, we face hundreds of thousands – perhaps by now, millions – of these things and those that guide them.  Impaling, hacking, strangling, acid, drowning, poison, none of that works – only burning, Valyrian steel, and dragon glass.  Nothing else.” 

Nestoris leaned back in his chair, his arms spread with his hands braced on the broad table.  Tyrion leaned into it, intent, his voice quieting.  “Westeros faces, in point of fact, annihilation. For us” – he gestured to himself, Sansa, Eustace – “the only chance for any of us in Westeros to survive requires a united front and as many living fighters as we can muster”

Tyrion nodded at Eustace, who advanced to replace the crate’s lid and secure its catches, then lock it.

“Granted all this is true,” the banker pursed his lips, “what has that to do with the Iron Bank?”

Tyrion shook his head.  “Do you believe that, once we are wiped out – which is likely, as things currently stand – no, that once we are all of us on Westeros _turned_ into these creatures – that the dead will all just stay there, confined to that continent?  Why would they?  They were not content to stay behind the Great Wall.  They are campaigning, under their Night King.  He is a conqueror.  What will he look to conquer next, once he has Westeros?

“He will come for Essos, the Free Cities, you.  He will. And you’ll not be able to stop him.”

Nestoris’s face was disturbed.  But he stroked his chin and then shook his head.  “Do they swim then, these dead?”

Tyrion shook his head, as well.  “Doubtful.  But the Walkers ride.  They are intelligent.  They assuredly can command boats and ships, of which there will be plenty available, when all the once-human owners are members of their horde.”

Nestoris’s eyebrow was arched, just enough to convey skepticism.  He opened his mouth, perhaps to make a final refusal.  But he could have forced them out several minutes ago, if he had already decided not to back them.   So Tyrion pressed on.

“Aside from that, sir.  My sister’s plan _is_ insane.  According to my father, you say that you do not bet.  The Iron Bank does not gamble.  This, Nestoris, is a guarantee: whoever wins this war, the living or the dead, will take my dear sister and the entire city of King’s Landing out.  She is a bad bet.  A very, very bad bet.”

Once they had left the dim environs of the Iron Bank, Tyrion, Sansa and Eustace stood blinking in the sunshine that was, indeed, waning early.  Sansa stared at Tyrion with something he almost dared believe was admiration, and he responded with a cocky quirk of his mouth. 

“My Lord!” Eustace exclaimed.  “I had not expected a positive result from the Iron Bank.  Not at all.”

Tyrion lifted his eyebrows. He kept the amazement he was feeling off his face.  He hadn’t, either. “It seems Nestoris is a more reasonable man than expected.”

Sansa did not speak, but her eyes were light.  It was lovely to see.  Tyrion felt light, too, as they made their way back to their lodgings.  They had to prepare for the next leg of their journey – a much shorter one, and one which Tyrion had not had high hopes of needing to complete, when they started out.


	12. Commencing to Fight

The war – the Great War – was upon them suddenly, one late should-have-been-morning when the sun was not yet up.  Sansa and Tyrion had not yet returned from their sally to the Free Cities, but a scout rode in with news that the Night King’s army was on the move.  With – and the man’s eyes were wide with fear when he said it – a dragon with blue eyes and breathing blue flame.

The Queen of Dragons turned whiter when she heard it.  But no tears dimmed her eyes.  Her posture was fierce as she paced out to lead her armies.

Jaime’s letters had borne a little fruit, perhaps in combination with the sheer numbers, now, of verifiable stories filtering south about the wights.  Two or three of King’s Landing’s looser allies were responding, braving Cersei’s anger and backlash.  But their men hadn’t arrived, yet, and likely wouldn’t do so in time for this first engagement.  It was Jon’s and Daenerys’s united force that would meet the army of the dead.

King Snow went, too, to address the Northerners. Brienne stood in the grouping of the leaders at his side, while Jaime in the ranks of those mounted on horseback.  He was permitted to fight, but not trusted enough to lead.  So be it, he thought.  A chance to fight was all he’d asked.  And when Jon turned his horse to head toward his watch post, Brienne moved hers to Jaime’s side, in the rank and file.  So that was all right, then.

They rode out to fight.  And as they did so, their horses moving almost in concert, Brienne’s large strong form moving in and out of his peripheral vision, it finally dawned fully on Jaime that not only was he finally able to fight on Brienne’s side, but from here on out he would do so _at_ her side.  The battle fierceness in his blood suddenly became so acute it was as though his veins held razors instead of liquid, cutting away at the corpse of his old, dead self.  This was an honorable fight if ever there was one, and they’d be fighting it together.

So many fell, wight, Walker, animal, and human, and the horde just kept coming.  And coming.  Queen Danaerys’s dragons continually flamed and yet the mass of walking corpses seemed unending.  Their dragon fought, too, it blue flame burning hotter than that of its two former brothers.  Waste was made to hundreds of men, more than once, by its passage.  Narrowly escaping a too-close encounter with that blue fire for the second time, Jaime had a brief second to wonder if they would need to re-fire all those burned corpses once the battle was over.  But that was a command decision, which was not his part now.

Now his part was only to fight.  It was not the kind of war where, once night fell, or one side’s losses were too many, parley and then respite would happen.  The Walkers did not sleep.  The Night King did not parley.  They would be stopped, slaughtered to the last Walker, or they would continue to advance south.  Following plans wrestled out of the military minds available, ranks of Northmen and wildlings met the masses of dead and clashed, while Dothraki and Unsullied dropped toward the south and rode over the frozen land like the wind, trying to loop around and strike from behind.  It was miles of riding, in weather to which they had not had time to become conditioned.  But they were, at least, for the most part now geared up for the cold, and their horses as well.  They rode.

Jaime fought, near Brienne as much as he was able, though wading into the melee meant he often lost sight of her.  She was usually soon back, though, at his side or in his line of sight. At every chance, she fought her way back to him or he to her.  He didn’t question this, it was just how and who they were.  In the battle, they were _together,_ neither of them a solo entity.

Not having as much skill at riding while fighting, Brienne lost her mount early on.  But his died not long after, overwhelmed by the weight of four wights attaching themselves.  He flung himself free and dealt with two of them while Brienne attacked another. The one that was lodged beneath the horse they dismembered together.  Both of them on foot, then, they fought on. She drove her sword through the chest of a once-soldier who was poised to kill Jaime while he wrestled his from the tree on which he’d impaled another.  He chopped one hand and then the next from yet another who was choking her.  Back and forth, apart but always back together, until the poor light waned, until darkness fell, until most of the movement on the battlefield was by dismembered corpse pieces, the struggle continued.

Until it stopped.  Jaime turned to meet another dead-light gaze and there wasn’t any.  He searched the field for shambling walks and found none.  He took a breath and found no need to raise his sword.  Movement on his right was Brienne, not an enemy.  Could they have won?  Or had the masses of the dead just made it past them, finally?

“Where are they?” Brienne wheezed, echoing his thoughts, and he shook his head.  Slid his sword into its sheath.  Sank to his crouch on his haunches on the befouled ground while she leaned her arms onto her thighs and drew slow, mighty breaths.

Others approached in the dark; humans.  Some of them bore lengths of wood.  Grimly, Jaime struggled back upright and found his flint.  Together, in the dark, those who remained alive sought out each body or part of a body and torched it. Hours later, the funeral pyre lit the sky for miles.   It was seen from Winterfell, he was told the next morning, after they had staggered back within its walls.  The army of the dead had been seen, as well.  Though much lessened in number, they were not defeated. They still marched.

The Dothraki and Unsullied were the last to return to Winterfell, having ridden south a ways to be certain anyone in the path of the oncoming horde was forewarned.  Their ranks had shrunk, as well, so much so that the extra-wall shelters that had been erected were hardly necessary, now.  Almost everyone – Northern, wildling, Dothraki, Unsullied, soldier, noble, commoner – though packed very tightly, fit within Winterfell’s walls proper.  They were that depleted after one battle. It felt like defeat.

Jaime allowed his wounds to be tended, ate what he could, and then slept more deeply than he could remember doing after a battle.  Often, even when exhausted, it was hard to quell the bloodlust after a fight.  Or the just plain lust, and his sister was usually not available. It made for long nights.  This day, though, he fell into the bed having barely washed, and did not awake until it was day again. When he did, it was to creak slowly from the bed with every joint, every muscle aching.  The chill air and his age, with the damage his body had sustained over a lifetime of fighting, were not a good combination.  Moving helped, though, and he did.  He made his way to the great hall to break his fast.  It had become a habit to eat his meals here – it was warmer from combined body heat (though hence more odorous as well) and it freed servants from the unnecessary task of bringing him meals. 

Brienne was already at a table, and he made his way to her as a matter of course.  She looked as rough as he felt. He scanned her for sign of serious injury, and finding none, felt relief.  Sometimes such things took time to make themselves apparent, but she appeared whole, if pale and bleary-eyed.

“You fought well,” Jaime greeted her. She nodded her chin at him.  “As did you,” she returned.  Jaime turned his attention to his food.  In truth, fighting on Brienne’s side, _at_ her side, had been fighting like he’d never done it.  Until exhaustion took him, it had been exhilarating.  The times they had been able to fight as a team – the extended awareness of her presence – even, the times they lost sight of each other, the relief when she returned to view – it was something that, if he was honest, he wanted to do again.

Which likely there would be opportunity for soon, he knew.


	13. Waging War

Scouts keeping Queen Danaerys and King Jon apprised of the movements of the Army of the Dead brought news afternoons later that it was turning its advance into more well-settled lands.  Villages, northmost of them a wildling settlement. Men geared up to fight once more as their leaders determined the swiftest routes to try and turn off that advance.  An alert party rode out soonest to alert the villages and try to effect evacuations south or west, away from imminent danger.  Where, Jaime wondered as he swung up onto his remaining palfrey along with anyone else who had been overnighting at Winterfell, would they evacuate to, in this cold?

They headed out at a rapid pace, needing to surpass the dead to engage them at their new front and cut off their access to the villages.  At dusk – which was falling hours earlier than it should - they engaged.  Daenerys deployed her dragons differently this time in conjunction with troop movements and against the dead Viserion, and it was surprisingly effective.  Whole ranks of dead were consumed by flame with relatively few of the living among them.  By the light of the flames catching dead tissue afire, the humans advanced and attacked any of the wights that survived.  In the distance at one point, Jaime thought he spied the Night King himself.  But it was dark and he had more immediate dangers to attend to.

This battle dragged on into the weary hours of the next day.  The sun was up before there were no more dead fighting in his vicinity.  Once again the field was put carefully to the fire before the fighters regrouped.  This time they were too far from Winterfell to retire there.  They would make camp here, near the villages they’d managed to partially protect, until there was more intelligence on the dead army’s movements. 

Jaime was awakened from a fitful, miserably cold sleep with Brienne and about 10 others in a farmer’s outbuilding.  Orders had come down.  They were moving again.

On it went; engage, fight until the dead horde had managed to advance, try to recoup, engage again.  Waking cycles of this of this became weeks, and after that Jaime lost track.  He only knew that after each battle, he and Brienne were still alive.  Increasingly wounded, but living.  Periods of actual sunlight became shorter and shorter. They learned ways of fighting the dead and lost fewer lives on the battlefield, but began to lose more to the cold. Life was darkness; waking, eating, fighting, sleeping in it.  Most of all, the fighting – then the burning, then the marching – then the fighting again.

Then one day, this changed.  One day, Jaime swung his sword through a Walker and then the dead horse it rode and in the distance heard a sound very like a trumpet call.  Moments later, when for lack of an opponent Jaime found space to pause and look about him, it wasn’t to a nearly empty field with a few fumbling humans left alive.  It was to a field rapidly clearing of wights and Walkers, and to an oncoming company of well-armored men, wearied perhaps but not as bone-deep exhausted as the remaining band of the living that met them. Jaime stood in near-stupor as one by one and group by group the Walkers or wights still upright fell before the swords wielded by men in armor he’d not seen before.  They fought quickly, with precision, advancing and turning with strict discipline at the direction of their leader.  Jaime felled the only wight to shamble within his reach, and then had time to take sight on Brienne’s location.  She was half the field away, leaning heavily against a tree. It was to her he made his way, wending through the advancing company of men.  But he reached to grab the arm of one when it became clear they were no longer enjoined in battle. 

“Who?” he demanded.

The man gave a short bark of a laugh and jerked a thumb over his shoulder.  Jaime let him go.  In the indicated direction, banners were coming into view.  Jaime squinted in the dim sunlight. The banner color was gold, with nary a device or design to mar the field’s perfection.  He felt his lower jaw inch down. Beneath the banner rode a fat man with a round, balding head. At that man’s side rode a remarkably small man …

Tyrion was back, and by some incredible means had brought along the Golden Company to fight on the side of life.

Jaime joined Brienne at her tree, sinking down to kneel on the ground. She gazed down at him, and he up, breaths coming quickly.  Her eyes – for a moment he lost himself in the wideness of her gaze, daring to hope that salvation was here in the form of a mercenary company.

He heard the story later – how Tyrion and Sansa had convinced Tycho Nestoris that his best bet was to side with life, how the Iron Bank had deigned to send a representative along with them to speak with  Harry Strickland, and how they’d convinced him of the need for the living to band together against an overwhelming foe.  The Golden Company, 10,000 men, horses, and elephants all, successfully surprised and then overswept the army of the dead’s rear flank.  They had been half-through the Night King’s forces before he and his Walkers were able to rally themselves.  Now caught between the Westerossi and Unsullied forces on the southwestern side and the Golden Company to their northeast, their choices were left with two directions for movement.  They chose the southwest, toward the sea; but Danaerys’s dragons and her swift Dothraki riders met them.  The Night King’s ranks were held, stymied, at the Neck: long enough for Jaime’s second round of increasingly desperate messages to bear fruit.  The Tullys had already rallied to Jon and Danaerys; once news of the Iron Bank’s change in strategy and the Golden Company’s chosen side went south on dark wings, other forces once loyal to King’s Landing did so as well.  With concerted effort, the Night King’s army was diminished, greatly so, and finally pushed into retreat.  Back to the North, back toward the Wall. 

That was how humanity’s first real chance at survival was purchased.


	14. Pausing for Breath

When the newly strengthened human campaign finally pushed the dead army back far enough that they once more approached the environs of Winterfell, the ‘days’ were only a few hours long.  The Northmen’s army encamped near enough to Winterfell that as many as could fit of its soldiers overnighted within its walls.  Jaime and Brienne made their way inside to reunions. Even on rations and in the dark, the living were finding ways to celebrate the recent retreat of the Night King and his Walkers.  The festivities were in full swing when Jaime and Brienne reached the Great Hall on their second night there, not having had enough energy that first night to try to join it.  If ‘joining’ was what either of them did, Jaime mused.  Neither of them danced.  Neither of them spoke much to others.  Neither of them even ate much – though to be fair, on rations, the food was not the event’s main attraction.

Jaime was standing aside from a loose knot of jubilant Unsullied, when someone with a stringed instrument struck up the first notes of what he instantly recognized as ‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’.   Fierce memory of a time that, for his heart, had been far darker than the night outside suddenly assaulted him.  Without thought, he searched for and found Brienne’s face over a crowd of increasingly exuberant men and women, and thought he saw something glinting in her eyes. 

He was half the distance to her before he even realized it, drawn in by the frown bisecting the blue light of her gaze.  Before he reached her, though, Sansa had claimed Brienne’s attention.  Whatever she had to say surprised Brienne, Jaime saw.  He stopped a polite distance away and waited for the two women to stop talking before he moved to Brienne’s side.

Brienne was clear-eyed when she turned to him.  He looked after Sansa, for a moment, and saw his brother intersect her path.  Sansa stopped to talk to him, her head tipped downward, Tyrion’s upward, and something about their respective postures gave Jaime pause.  Brienne looked at him, then followed his line of sight.

Jaime cocked his head.  “Do you think”- he started.

“Yes.” Brienne nodded. 

“For her?  Or for both of them?”

Brienne cast him a mocking look.  “He’s _your_ brother.”

“It’s not the kind of thing we talk about,” Jaime muttered.  “You know why.”

“Yes.”  Brienne’s face sobered.  Jaime sighed.

“Do you think she might entertain the idea of marriage, again?” he wondered.

It was Brienne’s turn to sigh.  “I don’t know.  I believe, given her preference, she would never marry again.  But she may not be able to pass up an opportunity for an alliance, if a good enough offer came through.”

Jaime nodded.  “And as things stand, she’ll be able to take her pick of whoever’s left alive.”

Brienne slanted him a look.  "Don't make the mistake of thinking my lady mistakes appearance for substance, as she once did.  She has learned much."

Jaime chose not to dispute the statement, and Brienne found herself grateful.  Fighting with Jaime was not something she wanted to do, tonight.

At their backs, the strains of ‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’ stopped.  Brienne stiffened a little as the acuity of her awareness of her history with this man heightened once more. She didn’t know what showed on her face, but Jaime’s altered.  They stood there for a moment, a small sphere of silence in the noisome revelry around them.  Then,

“Come with me,” Jaime said, simply, and Brienne went.

She followed him out of the Hall and its warmth: out to where cloaks and gloves were, where she followed him in donning them, wondering; then up stairs and finally out onto, despite the frigid cold, a parapet. They stood there in the snow and the dark.  The world was cold, now, and for the most part it wasn’t possible to avoid it.

“Something’s been bothering me.”

“What?”  Brienne asked. Although it was just after what should have been noon, it was already dusk. After the din and crowd and smoky odor of the Hall, the winter air felt clean and the lack of other humans peaceful, as they stood facing out over the fires in the temporary structures housing the Golden Company. It was so strange, to look across that expanse and not imagine the moving dead upon it, covering it.

Jaime had other things on his mind, though.  Things there had been little time to consider, until now.  He remembered two questions he’d asked her over, it seemed, half a lifetime ago – questions about a cloak, and her swearing to be his surety.  He had another, one that was older than those.  In fact, he’d asked it before.  He’d gotten an answer, then, but now – he wanted another.

“Fuck loyalty?”

She squinted confusedly in the dark, he saw, and barked at him in surprise. “What?!”

He made an impatient gesture.  “At the Dragon pit.  You had the right of it, of course.  I knew immediately after, and in this war you’ve been proved correct a hundred-fold.  But still. You are loyalty more than anyone I know; you live, eat, shit, and breath it.  And then, just – fuck it?”

Her eyes cut at him from the side, though she still faced front and away.  The incredulity in his voice struck her, suddenly and humorously.  She felt her lips tilting up in a full smile and ducked her head, knowing he’d seen it in the torchlight.  She saw him watching her, and knew _he_ saw that she was trying to restrain a real laugh when his mouth twitched.  He let his own smile out, and then his laugh too, all while gazing out at the frozen expanse.  He sounded so … young, so light.  She couldn’t keep hers in after that.  Out it creaked, rusty and disused.  Laughter. For a few stolen silver moments, they laughed together.

“Yes,” she said finally, soft mirth and something else less identifiable on her tongue.  “Fuck it.  I learned that from you.”

His face altered in an instant.  Levity escaped him.  His chin dipped, his jaw firming.

“No!” Brienne blurted, seeing that he’d taken what she hadn’t meant.  “Not – not like that.  Jaime. In the bath. Harrenhal. You told me – you gave over your loyalty oath for the greater good.  The good of smallfolk, children.  The city – the kingdom, really.”  She inched closer to him, intent.  For reasons she didn’t pause to examine right now, it was very important to her that he understand her true meaning.  “That’s what I learned from you.  Ser Jaime.  Sacrifice– of reputation, even honor – for the greater good.”

His face and shoulders were tense still, but in a different way than they had been before she lurched into her jagged explanation.  He tilted toward her to meet her eyes but couldn’t sustain it.  A self-mocking grin hinted at the corner of his mouth, and welcome as that hint of his old cheeky self was, Brienne forestalled it by reaching for his arm.  The cocky expression faltered as her fingers wrapped around the leather-clad, dwindled muscle at the end of his stump, where it met the cold gold hand.  His breath left his lungs in a gust. 

He didn’t move.  He barely dared breathe, for fear she’d stop touching him.

Her grip was strong, and her strength was part of her strange beauty.  Beauty grasped him, and he suddenly felt infused with it.  Like hot water by tea leaves: inexorably altered.  He said it aloud.

“Beauty.”

Her brow seized in confusion at the non sequitur, her gaze casting out to the array of camp fires below them.  Which was beautiful too, but –

“No,” he grated, now the one determined to be understood.  “Not that.  You, Brienne.”  By the time it formed her name, his voice was gravelly.  His own daring frightened him.  He had never tried to compliment a woman besides Cersei.  He was doing it awkwardly.

Perhaps worse than awkwardly.  She pulled back from him, and he did lose her touch.  “Ser Jaime,” she murmured, her cheeks flushed unattractively, her eyes downcast, “I am – I know what I am.  I"-

“Do you?” Jaime broke in harshly, mentally cursing her uncertainty, her mistrust of any man’s regard.  “Do you really know what you are?”

She met his eyes long enough to give him a narrow-eyed, defensive expression. That she felt a need to protect herself from him caused the beast in his chest to rouse.

“What I am is no fool!” she snapped at him.  Was the wench speaking through gritted teeth?  Yes, she was.  “Whatever else I am in truth, at least to a man’s eyes, I am ugly - large, strong, ungainly, unwomanly“-

“YOU ARE HONOR!” the lion roared, slamming his gold hand down on the stone of the wall.  Brienne startled back and actually put her hand to her sword, but then paused, movement arrested and face stilled.

“You are honor,” Jaime repeated more quietly, but no more calmly, his voice gritting and his hand opening toward her and his heart beating like a trapped rabbit’s.  The pumping of his own blood was the loudest sound in his ears.  When Brienne still made no move, nor sound, he dared step in to her, and reach toward her hand.  She let him have it, wonder of wonders. Now he spoke, just spoke, but his voice strained and cracked over emotion that surged against his fraying control.

“ _You are all of my honor_.”  The words were whispered, and ragged.

Brienne felt her lips part, but for a moment no breath could pass them.  Then, then, then – Jaime lifted the hand he held, brought it to meet his descending lips.  Brienne breathed, shakily, and found she couldn’t pull away, couldn’t protest.  He laid a kiss there on her gloved knuckles.  As if they weren’t two warriors still partially geared for war.  As if she was as lovely as any maid he’d seen in his years at court.  As if he were in a position politically, socially or economically to pay his addresses to her.

He stood that way, his expression hidden by his bowed head, while she gazed incredulously down at the glints of torchlight on his silvering blond hair.  Her breaths were rushed and shallow.

“How is it you don’t know this?” he finally husked toward their feet. His breath made clouds in the cold. And his hand was tight, so tight, on hers.

Shaking her head in a response unseen by him, Brienne now dared much.  She lifted her other hand, puzzling out that touch from her might be _welcome_ to Jaime Lannister.

Shaky though it was, her gloved hand settled to rest on his crown of mingled gold and silver.  She wished she could feel it: she imagined it was far softer than her own thatch had ever been.  Jaime’s escaping breath was a sigh.  A release.  There they stood for an eternal moment, entwined far more than the contact of hands and head bespoke.

 _Unaccountable,_ Brienne thought, eyes bound by the sight of him tilting her hand up and his face down to rub her knuckles along the bridge of his nose.  It was a strangely innocent gesture. His eyes were closed, and his lashes looked so soft in the dry cold air.  _Unaccountable - s_ he thought it again, unable to think anything but that one word, thought it in a silent kind of aching wonder, wanting nothing more than this and nothing else.

“Jaime,” she whispered into the frigid dusk, barely able to hear herself over the pounding of the blood in her arteries.  He lifted his head in response and under the unveiled intensity of his eyes she felt the need to softly tug her hand away.  He let it go.  “I cannot be your honor.” She had to stop to clear her throat.  “No one should be that for you.  You must find your own, claim your own.”

Her voice was so low he could barely hear her, but he listened intently.  He could feel that his jaw was tight but he felt open and vulnerable, as tentative as a wild animal.  “Allow it to be then,” he grated through vocal cords that felt like coarse ropes clogging his throat, “that you are my _definition_ of honor.”

He could see her lower lip trembling, just a little. Her eyes were wide, clear pools in the waning sunset. Her soul was there, bared for him.  That this prickly, guarded woman let him see into the heart of her awed him.  Humbled him.  He swallowed thickly, caught in the light of her eyes, and then caught again when she lifted a hand once more to his face. Touched, gently but without hesitation – that was a triumph.  “I’m not worthy of that,” she whispered, sounding as though she, too, forced words through an obstructed throat.  The depth of her, the moment, and the emotions in his belly might have broken another Jaime.  A former Jaime would have turned from her.  A previous Jaime would have japed. But this Jaime angled his chin into the rough caress of the big hand at his cheek.  This Jaime reached to the lady warrior, delved his left hand and his right stump into the warmth beneath her heavy cloak, and curved his fingers around her leather-clad waist.  This Jaime tightened his grip and tugged, but did not pull.

It was Brienne, breath coming in deep gusts, who stepped into him of her own volition.  Close enough for leathers to brush, and then again, close enough for torsos to press. Jaime’s own breath left him involuntarily in what was almost a growl.

He had wondered what her body would feel like against his, whether he’d be able to sense any curves.  He couldn’t, especially not through the layers they both wore.  It didn’t matter.  She was against him, _Brienne,_ of her own free will, and Jaime was afire in the cold. 

Her chin was brushing his cheek, tilting down, and his breath was caught in his throat as his chin angled up, and oh gods they were going to do this –

Except that the door that he’d closed behind them when he led Brienne out here clanged, prelude to opening, and they jumped apart.  Chests moving quickly.  Postures defensive.  Faces guilty, Jaime was sure.  A wave of frustration rode just ahead of a sudden desire to laugh.  He looked up, hoping she would meet his eyes – and she did not, gazing stiffly over the top of his head.  Suddenly awkward, when a moment ago-

Well.  They were a good five feet apart now, but he didn’t know what the man and the wench who’d tumbled through the door were impressed to think of them.  Perhaps not much; they were too entwined with each other to notice, at first, and then when they did the man grunted and the woman made a moue of disappointment.

“We’re going in,” Brienne blurted, and jerked her chin from Jaime to the door in what was almost a command.  Jaime sighed and nodded his head to the other couple when what he wanted to do was curse roundly and bash a few heads together.

There were more people in the corridor.  Now Jaime did curse under his breath, as moving past them Brienne quickly put distance between herself and him.  She turned a corner into a room, and when he arrived there moments after her, she was one of a veritable crowd of revelers. His teeth clenched in frustration, Jamie turned and started in the direction of the hall that would lead him to his chamber.

He was waylaid by Tyrion. 


	15. A Talk Between Brothers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which 'the kind of thing they don't talk about' becomes exactly the thing they talk about.

His brother held a half-empty wine goblet in his hand, but latched onto Jaime’s shirt determinedly.  Agitated, Jaime stopped.  He was in no mood for Tyrion’s wordsmithing if he was sober, and definitely not up for his foolery if he was drunk.

“I’m going to bed,” Jaime said curtly.  Tyrion narrowed his eyes at him. 

“First,” the shorter man said, “talk to me.  Talk with me.”

Jaime shook his head and resumed walking.  But the crowd kept his pace to one that Tyrion matched without trouble.  By the time he reached the quieter hall outside his bedchamber, Tyrion had stepped ahead of him.  He stood determinedly before Jaime’s door.  Jaime grunted irritably at him.  “How drunk are you?” he demanded.

Tyrion shook his head.  “Sadly, not at all.” He swirled the liquid in his goblet disparagingly.  “The wine’s watered.  Possibility of holding our own against the Night King or no, Winter is still here. Rations.”

Jaime sighed.  “Then, what’s so important that it can’t wait until tomorrow?”

Tyrion’s lips pressed together, and his face was suddenly so sober that it caught at Jaime’s heart.  “Tomorrow you leave again,” Tyrion murmured.  “There are things to be said.”

Jaime swallowed.  Wordlessly, he gestured Tyrion into his chamber.

“I saw you come back in from outside.  With Brienne,” Tyrion clarified, once he’d clambered onto a padded chair and Jaime had sunk down onto the edge of the bed nearby.  “I’ve heard that you’ve been fighting at her side, every battle.  I spoke with her before I left for the Free Cities”-

“And said what?” Jaime demanded, having wanted to ask since observing that conversation.

Tyrion’s gaze dropped, darted about the room, while his lips curled around words that he apparently considered, then discarded.  Watching his normally articulate little brother awkwardly search for something to say, Jaime shook his head.  “What did you _say_?” he reiterated, now with trepidation.

Tyrion sighed.  “You won’t like it.”

Had he offered Brienne insult?  Was that what she had been covering?  
  
“I told her you might require some watching.” 

Jaime’s eyes slitted.  “You thought I’d run away?”  That his brother would hold that admittedly common expectation was more painful than he wanted to admit.  But Tyrion heaved a breath from deep in his chest and waggled his chin up to the left then the right, a gesture that meant that wasn’t it.

“I told – well, I asked her.  To take watchful care, to stay near you, to …” even as his voice petered out, Tyrion hitched his shoulders back and his chin up and glanced quickly at him, an assessing glance.

Jaime blinked, then frowned. He was getting a sneaking suspicion.

“Care – you asked her to _take care of_ me?”  Like she might a child?  Or, a bit closer to home, an invalid?  Someone with a crippling deformity?  Jaime’s jaw muscles clamped down, and it was good they did, or he might be giving voice to the offense he was feeling.

‘I did.”  Tyrion slid on his rump to the edge of his chair, a compensatory move for the chair’s height that Jaime had seen probably thousands of times, and then off onto the floor.

“What – why?”  Past the offense, Jaime also found the idea bewildering.

Tyrion ruffed his hair with his hand.  He stared across the room, having the advantage when it came to avoiding eye contact. “If you want the whole of it, I told her I’d heard you lost your hand for her.  She didn’t like my tone, I think.  She snarled back at me that more than a hand, you nearly lost your _life_ for her.  And I, I said that … everyone you’ve ever believed in has failed you, Jaime.  Including me.  And I asked her to try to be the one you believed in, that didn’t.”

He finally met Jaime’s astonished gaze, with a characteristic soft smirk.  “I know.  It’s not a fair charge to lay on anyone.  But I did not want you dead,” he murmured, low.  “Still don’t. She was in the best position to help avert that.  Still is. And – and, I had seen already how you look at her.  How she looks back when she thinks you _aren’t_ looking.  It’s heartbreaking, and heartening, and I- I want you to have that, Jaime.  If you can.”

Jaime stared.  It took some seconds for these intensely personal observations of his brother’s to sink through his mind to the level of reaction.  When they did, he shook his head shortly against the wave of emotion he felt toward Tyrion.  Toward Brienne.  Toward the cursed situation he and they all were in.

“What did she say?” he wondered, and yes, there was a sheen of moisture across his vision.  He was beginning to wear his heart on his sleeve after all, in his old age, out there for everyone who knew him to see it.

Tyrion shook his head.  “She said that what was between you was none of my business.  She was right, of course.  But then she said”- he stopped, and looked up as if to gauge his brother’s expression.

“What?” Jaime snapped impatiently.

“She said there was no need to ask.”

Because, as his perspicacious brother had well understood, she would do it anyway.  Jaime nodded slowly, letting his eyes fall closed, because if he didn’t there were going to be tears on his cheeks.  And he wasn’t going to have that.  Not in front of his brother, not even for this reason.

“So.”  Tyrion seemed to be finished talking.

“So,” Jaime replied, opening his eyes again. He drew a long, careful breath, and speared Tyrion with a teasing, but intent, look.  “On a related topic – what’s going on between you and Lady Sansa?”


	16. Within Winterfell

Brienne spent what seemed the rest of the day and half the night – no, when most of life was night now, it was the sleeping period – trying not to stare at the door of her chamber and wonder if Jaime was going to come through it.

He did not.

She did not go to him, either.

The following morning – at the start of the next waking period – she left a bed that might have been made of pebbles, for the quality of her sleep upon it.  She stood in her room before dressing, shivering even at the fireside, gazing down at herself.  She observed the parts of her body that she could see and contemplated those she couldn’t.  She was angular, with legs like logs and arms like crossbows; she stood a head above many men; she was raw-skinned and crooked-toothed.  Her hair was like straw. Her breasts were as flat as any man’s.  She had scattered scars and disfigurements, some of them fresh and still ugly.  She had calluses in places unlikely for most women, from wearing armor so often. She compared it all to the words Jaime had uttered the night before.  She put her palm to her hard, muscled abdomen which tightened involuntarily as she recalled the look in his eyes and the guttural sound of his voice. 

Even now, hours later and after trying to do it, she was incapable of thinking that he had voiced lies.  All her fear and past experience of misuse could not make her believe it.  Her remembrance of Cersei’s sardonic, vaguely pitying look could not force her too, either.  Against those she had years of knowledge of Jaime’s honesty toward her; of his efforts to save her, from death and other ill fates; of his willingness to sacrifice himself in those efforts; of him keeping his promises at great expense to himself; of the honor that he hid from the world, but not from her. Jaime – a sober, earnest, awkward Jaime – had _wanted_ her last night.  He perhaps, and Brienne’s chest caught at the idea, had wanted her for a long time.

Maybe she had known that.  Maybe she had not until last night had the experience or understanding to label it and what it might mean.  Mixed in with all else that was between them, that of which she was absolutely certain – respect, care, affection, honesty, even tenderness – physical desire came late to the game, but added something with which she was, simply, unfamiliar.

Brienne knew enough of herself to value herself.  She was a woman of character and integrity.  She had never cheated, lied, or stolen to advance herself.  She was unselfish and loyal.  She was sword-skilled and disciplined and tenacious. She had honor in her spine, like iron. She was worthy of regard for all of this and much more: she believed it, and that so many men had failed to recognize her true self and appreciate who she was had perhaps made her generally scornful of men. Perhaps too generally, she thought now.

She knew she was a woman of worth, for everything that was inside her.  But excepting her father the men she had known in her youth were too short-sighted.  Their vision stopped at the level of skin and eyes and hair, muscle and bone, manners of moving and speaking. So, she had not in many years expected to be desired by any man.  Much the less had she expected to meet desire in the eyes of Jaime Lannister, who was beautiful in all the ways she was not and who clearly valued physical beauty as much as – possibly more than, given his attachment to his sister – any other man. 

Jaime Lannister, for whom a room in her soul had been particularly shaped, and furnished, and which he had quietly inhabited for so long.  What was physical attraction, anyway, she wondered, finally moving to put on the base layers of clothing that had been cleaned for her sometime in the preceding hours.  She had recognized Jaime as a handsome man from the first time she saw him.  Even months’ worth of filth and wasted muscle engendered by his imprisonment hadn’t been able to hide it. But she had held him in despite before coming to understand something of his character.  Before she knew who he really was, she had not enjoyed views of his face or form. She’d been, in point of fact, repulsed by him. Would she, last night, have felt that strange fire in her belly when he turned soft eyes on her, when he kissed her hand, if he were _not_ good to look upon? 

She rather thought she would have.

She put on what she could of her armor and opened her door, knowing Pod would not be far away to help her don it all properly.  He was, indeed, at a short distance.  He followed her down and out into the courtyard, where those gearing up were eating what they could of kitchen-cooked food brought out by servants.  It might be long before they had such again.  For some of them, it would assuredly be never. 

Sansa approached, beckoning over a servant with food. Brienne turned her attention to eating and exchanging a few last words with her lady, and Pod left her side.  When she felt full, she went in search of him; and that was when she saw Jaime from across the courtyard.  He was standing in torchlight, near to Pod and at an angle from her, garbed as she was in armor with his fighting sword strapped on.  Pod glanced about and saw her and nodded.

And suddenly, before Jaime could turn and see her too, Brienne felt a flush of shame at what she had done the last time she’d seen him. Tactically speaking, she’d _run._   Perhaps it was a strategic retreat, to gather her thoughts: certainly, taking time to do that this morning had helped.  But she was not a coward.

She was not going to run again.

She moved toward them and as she came nearer, Jaime did turn.  Not sure what his expression would reveal or hide from her, Brienne lifted her chin, determined that regardless, _hers_ would not be deceitful towards him.  His face was tired, old-looking under the flickering torches.  But the line of his jaw, so familiar, was reassuring; and his eyes met hers, clear and open, though searching.  The inner edges of his eyebrows were winged upward, inquisitive … and tender.

Brienne felt her breath leave her in a long, slow sigh.  She could feel that she was holding herself stiffly, perhaps even aggressively; but the care in his countenance softened her.  She met his gaze, in strength, but bent her lips in a smile.  A smile she had never smiled before, one that she hoped said, _I know I am desired_ , and _I am glad,_ and _I care for you,_ and _I am not afraid._

__

Some of that must have gotten through to him, for she watched as his searching look lightened.  His lips parted and their corners turned up. So she knew, coming to a halt between him and Pod, that things were all right and more than all right between them.

__

It wasn’t until Pod cleared his throat that Brienne realized she and Jaime had been staring at each other entirely too long for polite company, with smiles on their faces that were perhaps too intimate for an open courtyard milling with soldiers.  She jerked her head from Pod toward the armor that she still needed to completely don, forcefully.  He turned toward it, but still was squinting in half-puzzlement, half-dawning suspicion, when Jaime’s brother entered their little grouping. 

__

Jaime looked down to Tyrion as he began to speak about how soon they were headed out.  Pod moved to close latches on Brienne’s arm guards as she noted that Jaime never made any attempt to adjust for the height difference, just accepted it as a matter of course and bent his head to meet his brother’s eyes.  She wondered if they ever shook hands or hugged one another.  Then she wondered why she was wondering that.

__

Tyrion hugged no one.  But he clasped his brother’s arm tightly, and nodded to Pod, and met Brienne’s eyes with an expression that she felt meant something.  She was unsure what, exactly.  But she nodded to him, and then he was left behind as she, Jaime and Pod fell in with others who were exiting Winterfell’s courtyard.  Tyrion stepped back from the wall, falling in at Sansa’s side. Bran was next to her in his chair, his eyes lucid though still eerie as he watched the departing force. There were wildlings, Dothraki, Unsulled, Northmen, even some of the Southern men whose units had been too decimated to hold.  Out further, they would be meeting more of the same.  Tormund was out there, leading a mixed group of dragon-glass-armed villagers and wildlings. Daenerys was too, having opted to keep her dragons on the front lines.  Jon was here, but even now exiting through the gate with Arya not far from his side. Brienne wondered who among them would not return from battle.  But she wondered it fleetingly.  They had to fight.  Many would die.  Nothing could change that, and there was no point in dwelling on it.  Just so long as someone lived, lived past the end of it.  That was what they were fighting for – someone to outlive death.

__

She and Jaime did not mount up.  Horses were in very short supply, and any available had been given over to the Dothraki for the best use of a dwindling resource.  Their own horses and their replacements were long dead, and Brienne recalled the pain of losing hers well enough that she now understood Jaime’s habit of not naming his mounts.  They walked out, Brienne and Jaime and Pod, armored and expecting to engage the enemy within the hour.

__


	17. Recollecting - Tyrion and Sansa: Interlude 3

_“What is going on between you and Lady Sansa?”_ His brother’s question recurred in Tyrion’s brain that day after he watched him leave, returning to battle with Lady Brienne at his side. 

What was going on, indeed. As the gate closed behind the last of those venturing out to war, Tyrion slid a glance sideways and up towards the lady in question, whose stance next to him spoke only subtly of her anxiety for those going off to battle, to death.  To most around them, she stood with such coolness and pride it could be perceived as arrogance, nearly.  Certainly, to many of those about them she seemed unapproachable.  He’d heard those murmurs, from people who didn’t note his presence or that he was listening.

In their travels to the Golden Company, and their negotiations with them, and their journey back – he and Sansa had been often in each other’s company, and rarely by happenstance.  It always seemed as though, if he had not sought Sansa out, she had sought him.  There was an ease but also a certain energy when they were near each other.  Sansa did not smile often, but when she did, it was at him.  Each felt like a small victory to him and he began to make a campaign of it – Make Sansa Smile.  Once they were back in Westeros, and headed to Winterfell, they had only fire for light for most of the time outside the measly hours of watery daylight.  The further West they went the shorter the light was.

The first time they stopped for camp and settled in for their meager supper Tyrion had hitched himself up onto a low stone that his man had covered with a thick woolen blanket.  Moments later, Sansa exited the tent they were perforce sharing with three others. She glanced about their fire at the others who were settling in with their jerky stew and hard bread; she moved elegantly and served herself and then turned and walked to him.  She seated herself beside him, her thick and many-layered skirts taking up most of the area he wasn’t using.  He lifted his chin at her, companionably.  They ate.  It was a quiet meal, broken only by an occasional murmur by one of the Unsullied in their own language.  Tyrion was getting a broader range of words in the Unsullied and Dothraki tongues, and knew they were discussing watch and other tasks. 

He finished his warm stew, thankful for its heat in his belly, with a sigh.  Sansa did so soon after, soaking up its last dregs with her piece of bread to soften it.  He took her bowl and his and passed them to the Unsullied who was washing them.  He expected her to go in then; she would be tired, and cold, just as he was.  But she remained.  And so did he. 

The others filtered away, one by one, a few of them to keep watch; the last Unsullied grunted at him about banking the fire, to which Tyrion nodded.  Then the silence around them seemed complete, the rustle of the men in the tents at a removed backdrop. Sansa seemed tense next to him; her shoulders as straight as they had been in Joffrey’s damned court, her head high.  Her gaze, though; it searched the darkness on the other side of the fire, briefly, and the ground in front of her.  She seemed almost nervous.  Nervous of him?  There was no one else here.  Nervous for what?  The unspoken question tightened his throat.  Then, she lifted her right hand from where it rested in her lap with her left, and laid it on the blanket between them.  The other stayed lost in the folds of her skirt.  The right one trembled, a little, until she pressed its long fingers out against the blanket.

Tyrion’s mouth dried.  Sansa did not move without intention.  Even such a small motion as this had a reason.  She was asking, he thought, for him to touch her.  She was initiating, as much as she was able, and leaving space for him to fail to reciprocate.  She was doing it in a way that if he did so fail, they could proceed on as if nothing had happened, faces saved.

He didn’t debate with himself. He dared – for it did take daring, when not a word had passed between them in over a day – to slide his own gloved hand across to hers, and then over it while she stared down at the ground.  The moment she felt the contact, her eyeline jerked up, to the fire. He didn’t press or move further, just sat there.  So did she.

No words passed.  He waited; he would not for the world be the first to break this, whatever it was.  They sat there together long enough that he mentally traced every fine bone in the hand beneath her glove, absorbed the slenderness of her fingers, and the span of her hand longer than his own. After a time that seemed both short and long, Sansa quietly slipped her hand out from under his and arose and entered the tent.  He followed, bedding down next to her and the three Unsullied who were long gone into the world of slumber.  They all slept fully clothed, of course, and wrapped in their own blankets.  But how the ever-present cold had changed their lives, that a noble lady would bed down in a tent with men – gelded men and a ‘half-man’, yes, but still men - and no one would raise havoc about the impropriety.

The next evening was the same, and each after that on the way to Winterfell.  Sansa would find him, or he her, for their supper.  After the meal, and as the others were bedding down, Sansa always placed that hand there between them on the log or the stone or the blanket, and he always reached for it.  Without speaking, without eye contact.  He would move his glove over hers and they would sit there.  Often, she would let out a long breath, as though she had been holding it all day and was only now able to release it.  Sometimes, he would hum to himself, gentle or melancholy tunes.  They never spoke.

Their first night back at Winterfell, he had missed that.  Missed her, and gone looking for her everywhere but her chamber - without success.

Now, indeed – what was going on?  It wasn’t nothing.  She’d seemed to find comfort in him, or at least a comfortable place.  He had found … well, he had found that he was no longer willing to pretend to himself that she was just another poor girl in need of help.

She was more than that to him.  She was much more.


	18. Exhaustion

Sometimes, Brienne awoke surprised to find herself still in the world, and still with Jaime at her side.  True, the tenor of battle had changed for the living, and everyone alive seemed to have caught a second wind.  But still – so many had fallen, men by the thousands.  Women and children had been lost.  The army of the living was so much smaller than it had been.  She would feel herself, present in her body, and look to Jaime who met her gaze every time with attentiveness and awareness, and she would think in her daze of darkness and exhaustion – _this is a dream.  The dream of one who has already died._

But on they fought in the push toward the Wall – a Wall which, they were told, builders and Maesters and such Children as could be found were working frantically to rebuild. As the daylight hours continued to shorten, magic in the world seemed to be strengthening. There were rumors that humans from all corners of Westeros were finding sparks of it inside themselves.  Some of them came when the Maesters called.  Brienne also began to hear of strange things like candles that gave off an enchanted light but somehow were also being used for communication.  Magic was being woven right into the Wall as it was built, just as legend said had been done originally.  She and Jaime talked about that one of the few times they had energy for conversation, hunching over field rations at as small a fire as their unit dared make.  The group of them wondered what it looked like, and if it could ever be as strong as it once had been.

“Whatever the case,” Jaime muttered, “they better leave at least a part of it open for when the Walkers get to it.  We want them _through_ it, not trapped here on our side of it.”

Brienne rolled her eyes.  “I’m sure that’s the plan,” she snorted. The wildling sharing their meal, a hulk of a man (though not as hulking as Tormund) named Brehag, grunted. 

She and Jaime had not spoken of that time on the parapet at Winterfell. They were rarely alone for long enough that such a conversation could be broached, but if they ever were it wouldn’t have mattered.  It would require energy to talk about what had passed – or not passed – between them, and they were exhausted.  Life was darkness and adrenaline-spiked fatigue.  They awoke, dragged armor on, fought, dragged the armor off and tended weapons and burned the dead, ate if they could, slept if they could, awoke to fight again, mostly in darkness.

But between them, there was a change.  The air was different.  The world was different around them.  The status quo had altered.  Sometimes, sitting at the fire, she and Jaime sat so closely together that they were in fact pressed into each other, thigh to thigh and hip to hip.  Soldiers slept five and more to a tent to help avoid frostbite or freezing death, and Jaime always placed himself between Brienne and any other soldier in the one they were using – even though the next soldier over was usually Pod.  Pod had frowned about this, in the beginning.  But that hadn’t happened in awhile now. They all stank, filth encrusting their clothes because everyone needed to sleep whenever possible in order to fight, and using water for more than drinking in this cold risked limb and life.  And they all slept close, sharing as much heat as they could; armor off, limbs around each other.  It had been odd at first, but eventually Brienne felt right, and natural, and comforted, those cold nights with Jaime in her arms. Even with Pod and others, sometimes others whose names they didn’t know, all in arm’s reach, even in their mutual grime and odor and weariness.

There were times when Brienne, just as a woman, was thought to be prey by men who were too given over to the bloodlust of battle.  She and Pod together made short work of one of them.  Another time when it was a group of three men – who were also considering Pod fair game – she, Pod and Jaime laid waste to all of them.

The only emotional reaction Brienne could muster to it all was what a waste of life that was, life that could have been fighting death.

 

The war front did not shift, now; the direction of battle was always one, toward the Wall.  The advance slowed considerably as the Night King dug in and attempted to regain his former impetus. Given this, those directing the fighting took to shifting men up and back from the front lines, to allow for periods of increased rest and, hopefully, more alertness in those engaged in the fighting.  On Brienne and Jaime’s first such respite back behind the lines, they heard more rumors and news: Maesters had sent out their predictions about the light, and when it would be completely gone. 

But even without such predictions, everyone could tell that they were losing the light.  There began to be an odd kind of desperation in the air.  On a waking period just after a brutal fight to reclaim land east of the Wall’s breach, Jaime stood outside at mid-day, squinting up at the watery sunlight filtering through the clouds.  It had been full daylight for less than half an hour, and would be so for maybe a quarter of an hour more.  That was all.  He thought of the stories of the last Long Night, how the darkness lasted for more than a generation.  He swallowed.

Most likely, he would be dead before the sun returned.

The countdown of days was a morbid fascination to which no one was immune.  Whole minutes of light were lost each day. Some camps, Jaime heard, were planning battlefield celebrations of the light, on what was coming to be called the Last Day.  The Red Witch Melisandre, who purported to serve a Lord of the Light, had attracted a sizeable following to her religion.  Jaime had heard of her burning children at the stake, of her convincing titled parents to go along with it in the hopes that they would be spared the dark Night and its terrors.  It turned his stomach but he could understand the desperation, in a way.  What would the world be like, in a decade?  Would it be worse?  Or would people have grown accustomed by then?

Time passed and if there was any lull in the fighting for his unit, he found every reason he could to be outside for every second of remaining daylight.  He felt almost a compulsion to soak as much of what sunshine was left into himself, through his skin and tissue and bones and into his soul.  ‘Daylight’ became half an hour, then less - mere minutes.  The advance stalled again, closer to the Wall than it had yet been, the Night King perhaps becoming more desperate the nearer to it he was pushed.  Fighting concentrated into key areas as he was boxed in, and most units were able to cycle to and away from the front and receive real respite.  Brienne and Jaime were amongst those, and for a stretch of three days there was a chance to breath – to sleep – to even bathe.  With brains and emotions more awake due to having rested, Jaime found himself contemplating his and Brienne’s history, and how it was to be constantly at her side, and how much himself he felt when she was around.

One cloudless day with the most intense fighting at a distance from their entrenched position, Jaime saw that not for a second did the bottom of the sun’s glowing orb clear the horizon before it began to sink again.

That was the wake period that he went to Brienne, and asked a favor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a short little bit! The next section will be up very soon.


	19. Venturing into the Dark - Tyrion and Sansa: Interlude 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tyrion and Sansa converse, and as the chapter title says, their talk goes to some heavy places.

“Is there news?” Tyrion asked, entering the small room that usually served Sansa and a few others she chose for breaking her fast.  Her summons – and it had been worded as a command – had come while he was still getting dressed, and before he’d eaten.  He’d finished dressing but not stopped for breakfast.  They hadn’t spoken, really, except about matters of state since returning from their trip to the Iron Bank.  He had started to lose the slight, burgeoning hope he’d been nourishing.

The room was warm, as bright as any room got any more with a moderately sized fire.  He imagined Lady Brienne had often been here with Sansa. The thought of her immediately led to one of Jaime. Tyrion experienced a sudden, sharp arrow of anxiety through his heart at the thought of his brother and the Maid, possibly at that very moment enjoined in battle or already dead.  There was nothing he could do for them, so he shoved the fear aside as best he could.

Sansa was seated near a low, small table, accepting tea that was poured by a servant.  Aside from the servant she was alone. She had looked up at his entrance.

“Thank you for coming.”  She gestured him nearer.  There was a second chair completing a set with hers and the table.  They were of an elegant type that had a higher seat than was comfortable or dignified for Tyrion to climb into.

Before the second chair was a step.  A portable, short step, made for short legs.

His eyebrows rising, Tyrion blinked at it, then at Sansa. She was watching him closely.

“I remembered,” she said quietly, folding her hands together in her lap with small, precise movements, “my sister Arya using stairs like these when she was very young, and wanted to reach what I could but she couldn’t, yet.  I wondered if you might … find it useful. If not, it can be taken away.”

The look on her face told Tyrion that his reaction to this mattered to her.  He gave a brief, matter-of-fact nod and mounted the stair, then turning on it and seating himself.

“Excellent,” he pronounced, making his face cheerful and his voice breezy.  “I’ll use it.”

She sat back a little, and he saw her shoulders relax. 

When she turned her attention to her tea cup, he allowed himself a deep breath to settle his heart.  This was a first, that someone would try to make such an accommodation for him.  Had the gesture come from someone else, he might have been offended at the shot to his dignity. From another, he might have refused it.  But not from Sansa.

After a sip of her tea, and gesturing for the servant woman to pour for him as well, Sansa spoke again.

“Is anything wrong, my lord?”

“Much,” Tyrion replied, “But nothing of which you are not already aware.”

“When you first entered, you appeared worried.”

“Ah.” Tyrion cleared his throat and briefly considered dismissing her concern.  But it was encouraging that she was asking a personal question, and he had a feeling she would know if he lied.   “I sometimes unexpectedly have thoughts of my brother, and how he might be faring.  I expect you have the same, for Jon and for Arya.”

“Yes.”  Sansa looked off across the room at nothing in particular, for some moments.  Tyrion knew she’d argued against Arya even going off, though Jon promised to keep her with him.  He understood.  Arya was so young, and a beloved sister, besides being – in the strictest sense – a lady.

But he’d seen her fight and knew that Jon had been right when he’d told Sansa that they wouldn’t be able to keep her from going, and that at least this way they’d have eyes on her.

Sansa moved her head to dismiss the serving woman, and she left. Tyrion watched the servant go, and watched her close the room’s door as though it had been discussed ahead of time.

"It seems you have something to say," he murmured, eyebrows raised.   
  
"I do." Sansa nodded, and took what he thought was a fortifying swallow of tea.

“I am not an easy woman,” she began.  Tyrion frowned.  It wasn’t the opener he’d expected.  “Do you know – at the Battle of the Bastards” – her lips turned down around that last word, and he wondered if it was another label that she disapproved “-we nearly lost.”

Tyrion nodded.  He’d been in Mereen with Daenerys, dealing with the slaver fleet.  But he’d heard.

Sansa’s eyes were looking at something not in the room, something far away.  “Once we knew that Rickon was captured, Jon still tried to save him.  Expecting to die, he tried to save him. But I - I knew Rickon was as good as dead, already. No.” She shook her head, sharply.  “I _gave him up_ for dead. Jon still hoped to save him, and I just moved on, to figuring out how to assure that Ramsey lost.  And _when_ he lost, I fed him to his damned dogs.”  Abruptly, her eyes flew to Tyrion’s like spears to his heart.  “Do you understand?  I am not an easy woman.  I do not have the honor of my brother, or the heart of my father.  I did what I thought I needed to, to gain the power we needed, and I gave over my little brother’s life for it.” Her face was hard, no give in it at all.  She had asked if he understood, but she was not asking for understanding, only comprehension.  _This is who I am.  What will you make of it?_

Tyrion nodded, slowly, his hand flat on his knees.  He’d been intent throughout her short monologue.  It was a harsh thing, even a horrible thing, that she was describing. And her transparency demanded, he felt, the same from him. “My lady, you know that I killed my own father.”  Not easy to words to say; defaced of the mocking tone in which he usually covered them, they were sharp and painful.  “I did that in a fit of rage, and some would argue - after hearing of what the man had done to me - that it was justified.  But just before that …” He stopped, gauging the moment, her face, her soul.  And then thought, _fuck it._ If they were going to do this, then let them do it in the light.  Nothing hidden.

“Do you remember Shae?”

Something in her face changed. 

“She was my lover, before and during my marriage to you.”

Sansa didn’t move.  Tyrion soldiered on, committed now.  “On the night Jaime got me out of that cell – I found her in my father’s bed.  A bed that used to be mine.  She’d lied that I conspired to kill Joffrey, and she was there in my father’s bed, and I – strangled her.”  He had to stop and swallow, hard.  He could still feel her slender neck under his fingers.  “It was a slow death.  I had time to stop.  She fought me.  I finished the deed.”  He looked down at his hands, clenched now into fists on his thighs.  “You once spoke of feeling shame for having abandoned me, my lady. After finding out that she never loved me, and was in fact a whore hired by my brother, I abandoned my first wife when she was in horrendous exigency.  And I murdered the next woman I loved with my own hands, slowly.  Both of them women who likely had very little control over the direction and events of their lives”- his eyes were burning, and he closed his lids over them.  He breathed, merely that, for a stretch of time.  When he opened them again, Sansa was still there.  _Why_ , he wondered, _after hearing that_.  But he had to finish; having started this path he felt driven to see it through.

“More than murdering my own father, these are the two sins that blight my soul and shall until the day I die.”  He pushed the short, ugly words out his throat.  His hands uncurled, opening toward her, almost a pleading gesture.  Sansa stared down at them, and he saw her own clenched tightly now in her lap.  He couldn’t hear her breaths, or the crackle of the fire, or his own heartbeat.  He waited for her next move.

She did not look back up into his face.  His chest was tight with anxiety.  But she didn’t leave, either. 

She picked up her tea cup.  Her damned tea cup, and took a long drink.  She almost drained it, while he waited with his soul poised on a bed of nails.

“On the road home from Braavos,” she said, setting the delicate cup down in its saucer.  The motion had a _so, then_ character to it. “Do you recall?”

Tyrion blinked at the sudden change in their course, and a moment later his heart kicked.  _Are we finally going there?_ His throat still felt raw, and he tried to make his voice gentle.  “Sitting with you at the fireside? I do, my lady.”

Sansa’s cheeks flushed, perhaps, but she soldiered on. “That was a trial.”

Tyrion cocked his head, and said nothing but let her continue as she would. 

“A trial serving to answer two questions.  One, would you presume more liberties than I permitted, if I gave any indication I sought your touch?”

Tyrion couldn’t help frowning, and it was a struggle not to give vent to the words on his tongue.  But he held them back. If his actions didn’t speak to her of his character, his words were pointless.

“Two, if you did touch me in a way that was more than merely friendly, or supportive, could I take it?” Her chin rose in the air, as she gathered dignity to her like a cloak while speaking such revealing words.  “Or would I freeze, or run away?”

Tyrion swallowed, again, against the reaction he had to the sting of that ‘could I take it’.  He knew that was about her experiences with brutality and perversion, and no statement at all about him as a person.

“I didn’t know if I could tolerate the touch of a man, that way, now.  There are things – I have nightmares” – she was frowning too, fiercely.  She gave her head a short, sharp shake.  “It seems perhaps I can, yours, anyway.  I should tell you though, I don’t know how much further I could go than we did.” 

“Why?” Tyrion inserted, quietly, pushing away the thoughts of _further_. 

“Why?” Sansa finally looked at him.  She glared.  “You know why.”

“I know why you would, understandably, struggle with any man ever touching you again.”  He said it firmly, wanting to be sure she heard his affirmation of her needs.  “What I don’t understand is why you feel you should tell me this.”

Her face went vey still.  When she spoke again, her words were wooden.  “I will have to marry again.  I can’t avoid it.  But I do have, now, some measure of control – enough that I can expect to choose my next husband, as long as I choose reasonably.”

A sardonic jape formed in Tyrion’s mind, about how reasonable a choice a disowned Imp might be stacked against her other options.  He shoved it away, too, instead taking a sip of his own tea; Sansa would not find it humorous.  And his heart was picking up speed, clamoring to his brain that there was a _reason_ she was bringing up marriage as a topic, to him.

Sansa shifted her weight. Her hands were white, clenching around each other. 

Tyrion stared down at his tea.  She was awkward, but here in this quiet firelit room she was being as vulnerable with him as she had ever been.  _Don’t react too strongly_ , he strictured himself, even as he vowed to be worthy of the trust she was displaying.  She seemed to have stalled, and he desperately needed more information. The tea was beginning to cool. He sipped more.  He wanted wine.

Sansa deliberately separated her hands that were just on the verge of wringing.  She smoothed them out along the edges of her skirt, trying but starting to fail at keeping her lips firm or her voice clear as she leveled her gaze at Tyrion.

“Do you know what I’m trying to say?” Sansa demanded.

“I think I do.  But I don’t want to assume, Lady Sansa.” He wanted to never assume, with her. She was struggling, though. "I"- she began, and left off frowning to try again with "If"- but got no further. Her expression became fiercer. Tyrion desperately wanted to talk but dared not. It would be too easy to upset the delicate balance they had been maintaining.  
  
And their seats were too far from each other for him to do the one thing he was fairly sure would help, and offer to hold her hand - at least not without getting obviously and awkwardly down from his seat and approaching her. There was no way to do it with any subtlety, and he was fearful of denying her dignity.   
  
So he just sat, keeping his face friendly and feeling impotent, with mounting frustration as Sansa's cheeks became more pink and she grew visibly more agitated. She rose to her feet, hands clasped firmly before her, glaring at the wall past his head. Then she lifted an arm abruptly, frustration evident, and spread her hand toward him in an odd mixture of imperiousness and pleading.   
  
"HELP me!" She exclaimed.  
  
Direction, at last! Tyrion finally felt free to leave his chair, clamber down the step, approach her, and most of all, speak. At least enough to ask-  
  
"If I may hazard a guess, my lady?"  
  
"Yes, please!" She huffed, but he could sense that it was herself and her inability to voice what she needed that was the source of her frustration.  
  
He spoke, treading once more into deep and murky waters very, very carefully.  
  
"Being the perspicacious woman that you are, you well know that the strongest and most enduring alliances are won through marriage. You cannot afford, in the new world that's being formed as we speak"- _that Jaime and Brienne are possibly giving their lives toward as we speak_ \- "to ignore any means you have of strengthening Jon's and Danaerys's grasp on Westeros, such as it will hopefully be." _Softly_ , _Tyrion, make your voice soft_. "But you have found under, I think, great personal duress that marriage is risky. And you are, perhaps, contemplating"- he stopped briefly to clear his throat, and smile self-deprecatingly - "better the Imp you used to know, than the potential monster you don't at all."  
  
She was frowning down at him, and he knew what she was about to say, and he loved that he knew it almost as much as he loved that she was going to say it.  
  
"If you would, as a favor to me, please stop that," and she was now able to speak with her usual flow, which had been his motivation for that self-deprecation. "You know I don't think any of those terms should be applied to you." She moved back to her chair, seating herself, and he moved as well and stood next to her.  
  
"I know," he acknowledged. He put his hand on the arm of her chair. Just in case she needed it. "And when you told me that on the ship it affected me. You must know that." Was the air extraordinary dry in here? He kept having to clear his throat. "But it's my armor."  
  
She clocked her head, looking at him from less of a height difference now that she was sitting. "Your armor," she repeated, slowly. She was so close to him, and seemed restful in his nearness, but they weren't touching. It was enlivening and frustrating, both, and HE did not feel the least restful.  
  
_Rein it in, Tyrion._  
  
_But also, be honest. She requires and is due that._  
  
"People will think and say what they will. But if I take what they call me, their opinions, and make them my own – if I proudly don them and wear them - they cannot hurt me. So yes, I wear such labels as armor."  
  
Sansa was still, and measured him with her eyes. The room was very quiet, with only an occasional snap from the fire for sound. After some moments, she nodded. "I understand," she murmured, and he knew that she did. "But my lord," and her voice dropping further in volume, "I would prefer - I would like" - she paused, and took a long breath while he waited with heat and hope prickling across his skin - "It is my desire that you will know you do not need armor with me."  
  
If Tyrion had had to speak, he could not have. He thought his vocal chords might be completely frozen. If ever anyone could hurt him, the thought came furiously, she could. Somehow she had gotten around his armor, such as it was - his words and his whores, his intelligence and his status, his machinations and his alcohol, everything he used to keep the world at bay. She was through it all, she was close to his soft inward parts, she could do damage. How, he wondered painfully, had he let that happen?  
  
He had two choices; shove her away, get her out to arm's distance where he could get his defenses up - or take the risk and clasp her close.  
  
He nodded slightly, to himself. Sansa had never left off gazing at him, while he stood contemplating their hands inches apart on the arm of her chair.  
  
"At least, please know", and Sansa's throat must have been tight too, for her whisper was ragged, "that should I ever hurt you, it will hurt me as well."  
  
Tyrion felt his teeth clenching together against the welling emotion from his gut. He opened and manipulated his jaw to relax it. He turned his hand over so that it lay, palm up, before her. Sansa moved hers onto it without hesitation. He wove his fingers between hers and pressed their palms together. Sansa breathed in and out, roughly. There were pools standing on her lower lids, prisming the color of her amazing eyes.  
  
Finally, touching her, he could speak, even though it came out raw and threadbare. "This is risky, my lady. I think you are braver than I."  
  
Her expression was multi-faceted, and fear was an element there quite plain for him to see. But not the only one. And now that he was speaking, she was the one to choose gestures over words: she moved through the small space separating them, her fingers tightening on his, and brushed his cheek with the softest of kisses.  
  
Soft, but the reaction of Tyrion's already frantically beating heart was intense. His eyes closed; his face tilted down, till the gentle womanly touch of her mouth was at his temple. He leaned into it, and lifted his other hand to occupy it with the back of her head. He cradled her there, fingers sinking into the luxurious red strands of her hair. Nothing more. He did not press.  
  
Sansa, though, edged backward enough to face him, and then forward enough to kiss his lips.  
  
It was glorious. Sweet, and a little trembly, but as she lingered against him there began to be some spice to it. Tyrion let himself stroke her hair. He felt her fingers against his neck, fluttering, and then she cupped his nape and tilted her head. That moved the kiss deeper, and eventually he touched her lower lip with just the tip of his tongue.  
  
Then he moved away, and before she could do more than frown, pulled the step she'd given him over to her chair.  
  
"May I?" Hoarsely.  
  
Eyes large, but gleaming, she nodded. He thought he saw a decrease in her distress, and along with her determination there was much of the spice he'd felt, there in her expression. The hope that had been burgeoning in his chest for the past weeks became less fragile. _Maybe we can do this_.  
  
She shifted to the side of the green brocade chair. He stepped up the single step, and knelt with his legs alongside hers. They were a lovely tight fit in the chair's confines. His knees pressed against her hip. He was on folds of her skirt, that couldn't be helped. For a moment they just looked at each other in the firelight.  
  
His lips surprised him by curving up. She lifted a questioning eyebrow.  
  
"I'm not amused," he told her, reaching slowly for both her shoulders. If she needed to move away, she could. She would always be able to. But she didn't. Instead, she returned the gesture by clasping both of his upper arms.  
  
"I'm glad," he explained. "More glad than I've any right to be."  
  
And now she smiled too, and there was more than a hint of satisfaction in her face.  
  
"I am making a wise choice," she said firmly. He did not have to ask what the choice was. And he couldn't think long on it, or the wildfire in his chest might explode.  
  
Better to be doing, now, than thinking. He banked that fire protectively, and tenderly leaned in, and Sansa met him mid-way.


	20. Standing in the Sun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear readers - I changed the rating, for this chapter (please let me know if you think it needs to be one level higher). This is not the type of graphic scene I generally write, because I usually feel that characterizations or plots are not furthered, and sometimes are impeded, by too-detailed descriptions of physical intimacy. However, for these two, I'm making an exception. I think their characters and the storyline both demand it. Let me know how it strikes you.

Brienne acquiesced to Jaime’s requested favor.  They stood outside together just before the next light, the next ‘day’ that bid to dawn without clouds.  Most members of the fighting units around them had done likewise lately, moving short distances from the small village that had become their camp.  There was space to house all of them; the residents were either themselves out fighting, or dead. The soldiers had been able to rest, and even bathe, for the last 4 days, and there was now some space and enough energy to more deeply appreciate that which they were losing.

There was also time, Jaime had found, for unresolved situations to be considered.  He’d had time to realize how much he would regret it, if either he or Brienne were lost in battle and he’d never even … tried.

But this morning was for his favor, which Brienne had granted him trustingly without asking why. She followed him, for once, a silent hulk behind his left elbow as they walked out a bit before finding a place apart from the others, somewhat sheltered by wind-driven and snow-laden trees.  They watched the sun, reddish and dull, tipping over the land.  The miles of snow about them caught the colors of its rays and reflected them, increasing visibility and beauty.  When it seemed the orb was at its height, and its light had at least turned more gold than red, Jaime turned to Brienne wordlessly.  He backed away a step, far enough that he could take her into his gaze with one sweep of his eyes, up and down.  She stood self-consciously, frowning at him awkwardly.

 _This is what she looks like in sunlight_ , he told himself, and returned his line of sight to the top of her head as Brienne seemed to catch the depth in his intent.  She became still and quiescent under his gaze.  Slowly, methodically, he began his survey again, this time cataloguing it all.  The tousle and precise straw-like color of her hair.  The bunching of skin between her brows, the line of her nose and cheeks and the curl of her lip. The tilt of her chin. The exact hue of her skin in this light.  By the time he had regarded the strong tower of her neck, the bastion of her shoulders and chest under the fur, the linked lengths of her arms and the sturdiness of her torso, the light was already waning.  What he could see of her legs revealed them to be firm like tree trunks and planted as solidly.  He gathered it all into his mind and his heart, greedily, trying to impress the image there. 

He returned at last to her eyes, those eyes, the eyes that could slay him with their beauty.  Hating even to blink, jealous of any split second given over to the encroaching darkness, he tried to memorize the precise blue of them.  He stared at them until the color was leached out of them with the loss of light.  He stared at them through the onset of dusky twilight above them.  Then he let his eyelids close over his own eyes, that burned as they were re-moisturized. 

“Thank you,” he breathed, the first words between them since morning light had broken over them.  He heard her clear her throat, and imagined she was frowning again.  When he once more opened his eyes, she was still there before him. 

Her forehead was wrinkled as she gazed at him, searchingly.  He wondered if she found what she sought in his face.  He offered a smile, slight and understated for all that he was feeling.

“Are you done?” she wondered gruffly, and to a stranger it would have sounded hostile.  Jaime only shook his head and held out his only hand.  That was the extent of the favor that he’d asked, and it was bitterly cold out here.  But he wasn’t yet ready to return to camp. Brienne looked down at the offered limb, then slowly reached out to give him hers, folding her gloves around his: that helped to still its slight tremor. He breathed deeply, and saw her expression shift as she observed it.

“Brienne,” and surely the huskiness of his voice could be excused due to the way his heart had begun to beat faster, “if you fall in this fight, is there anything you will regret?”

“After I’m dead?” she snorted archly, eyebrow raised.

“Yes,” he said calmly, refusing to allow himself to be sidetracked into bickering no matter how tempted. “After you are dead, is there anything you will wish you’d done?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, in suspicion.  She frowned at him some more.  Then, “yes”, she nodded abruptly.

“Me too,” he responded, edging a step closer to her.  “But there are a few things in particular, that I would wish done.”  He waited for some inkling of comprehension to dawn (dawn, it was such a beautiful word) on her face.  It did not.  His throat felt dryer than dust.  “There are words I would wish said.  Feelings …” he had to stop to clear his throat.  “Affections I would wish I had acted on.” 

Why was this so hard?  The _feelings_ had been there for so long.  Perhaps that was part of the problem.

“Between us,” Jaime plowed on, starting to feel rather stupid as well as desperate for a way to be less obscure.  Brienne was gazing at him, unflinchingly, and her brow was beginning to clear of its lines.  Her lips had parted.  Jaime found more words, and they were breathy for the simple reason that he felt short of breath.  “I - I think it’s time we did something about this.” He increased the pressure of his hand against hers, for emphasize, and just in case she somehow still did not take his meaning.  Slowly, finally, her eyes began to widen. “What - what do you think?”  His voice cracked, a little, on the last word.

Brienne’s eyeline broke from his, stutteringly, and went jaggedly off sideways across the snow-blanketed, darkening field in which they stood. There, there was the realization. She swallowed, once, and tilting her head back closed her eyes against … something.  What, Jaime did not know, while he stood feeling as though he’d placed his entire soul on a measuring balance suspended from Brienne’s hands.

He prayed it would not come up wanting. He stood for agonizing moments staring at her profile.  His throat felt like it was closing; he was increasingly cold in his extremities but with a growing flame inside, waiting for her to answer.

Then she turned back and impaled him on the spear that was her gaze, her nostrils flaring, her jaw tense, her shoulders square.  “ _Yes,_ ” she said, and her tone was unequivocally aggressive, and for a moment his brain did not register the actual word.

Her eyebrows rose, and her expression went fierce. “Well?!” she demanded, when he didn’t move.

Breath suddenly returned to his lungs.

“I – yes!  _Yes_ , is it!?” His voice cracked again, as though he’d re-entered puberty.

“Yes!” she barked, and gave the hand she held an impatient yank, and he stumbled once before finding his feet as she towed him back toward their lodgings.

Toward a farmer’s house, that was: a house they were sharing with the farmer and his family and Pod and two bannermen, not to mention four soldiers who bedded down in the barn.

Gods, there was no private place anywhere. What had he been thinking?

Then he saw that Brienne had a destination: the barn, attached to the house but separated by a thick door.  The soldiers were sleeping there at night, but everyone congregated in the house during wakeful hours, if they weren’t fighting.  Hopefully none of them would be in the barn itself at this hour.

Brienne moved that way as if … well, as if she’d already had it pictured.  Had she been thinking of a moment like this, of a chance at this?  The thought of her imagining anything, planning anything like what he’d been visualizing was enough to make his body physically react. 

He was keeping up with her now, and their pace over the crusted snow even in the dark was quick; just not quick enough to account for how rapidly his breaths puffed out into the cold air.  There was time enough on the way, though, for full realization of what they were doing – and with that knowledge every part of Jaime felt alive.  His blood sang in its rush through his arteries. Half-way to their goal he felt so warm he almost ready to tear his cloak off right out in the open cold.  But they reached the barn’s outer door, and Brienne scrambled at the latch, letting out a gust of frustration when it didn’t open under her heavy gloves.  She did get it on the second attempt and flung the door wide, almost charging through it and pulling Jaime after her. 

And then they were inside the warmer barn with the door clanking shut behind them, and thank the Seven no one was there but the cow and the goat, and Jaime was biting at his glove to get it off, and Brienne – walked away from him to the opposite end of the barn.

“What” – Jaime started, and then cut himself off as she first barred the door into the house, then picked up a straw bale and dropped it to the ground in the corner furthest from the exterior door and the cold that seeped in around it.  She separated the tough twine holding it together with a quick, strong tug that twisted desire down his spine.  Bending, she spread the relatively clean straw around until a reasonable layer of it covered the dirty floor.

Standing apart from her in the dim light afforded by the room’s one fire, kept lit to keep the valuable cow and goat from freezing, Jaime’s forward impetus was forcefully paused.  But watching Brienne’s practical arrangements, he had to chuckle.  Brienne darted a disgruntled look at him over her shoulder, and rose to her feet.  She removed her cloak and spread it over the straw.  Then she turned around.  In the flickering light of the fire, she stared him in the eye while unbelting her tunic, and the tunic fell open.

Humor fled as his blood hummed again, a sweet song of longing. Jaime let his breath out slowly between his open, suddenly dry lips.  His skin prickled and his jaw muscles clenched. He resumed tugging at his glove, but at a more measured pace. He did not want a hurried coupling in the dark, with the ever-present fear of being heard or seen.  He wanted this to be as different from times with Cersei – from all his times before - as possible.  He got the glove off, and then his cloak while beginning to move toward Brienne. It was like stepping into lightning, his movement into that space. When he reached her he dropped his cloak down atop hers.  When he stopped before her, his boots touched hers. 

The air between them crackled and sparked.

His voice was hoarse, and all the sound he could make now was a low, “Brienne.”

She reached for him.

He wanted more than one hand.  She seemed to not know precisely what to do with either of hers, once she’d gotten him up against her.  They were awkward, the two of them, and a bit clumsy.  The feel of her body against his with no more than the thin layer of his clothing between them, was still unfamiliar.  He held still for a moment and absorbed the sensation; while he did so Brienne’s arms somewhat hesitantly encircled his shoulders and her palms pressed out against his back – slowly at first, then with the hint of a demand. Heat was a moving stream inside Jaime’s chest as he lifted his hand to her cheek, spread it along her jaw and tilted her face down to him. He brought his lips alongside her face and brushed one kiss over her cheek, then another, then a series of them.  Quiet, small kisses, such as he had never given to – he did not want her name in his head, not in this moment, though comparison was instinctive.  Mentally he took a sword to such thoughts, slashing at them. 

His mouth had arrived at the angle of Brienne’s jaw, below her ear.  Her skin there was so warm, and surprisingly soft, and when he parted his lips and gently used his tongue on her, Brienne gasped.  The sound thrilled heat from his chest up toward his brain.  He did it again, harder, stroking and pushing into the corded muscle of her neck.  She groaned and suddenly figured out what to do with her hands.  Her fingers grasped both his shoulders and dug into him there, pulling him to her.  He had to fight against their pressure when  he withdrew from her neck enough to see her face.  Her lips.

No kiss, he thought in a smoky haze just before his thoughts melted past reason, could have been imagined more than this one.  He’d played it out in fantasy so many times.  But this – _gods old and new._ He moved up the few inches separating them and suddenly there was nothing separating them, not history, not houses, not uncertainty, not duty, not distance, not appearance, not air.    _This_ , the tangibility of her cracked, cold, dry lips on him – the movement of them, the feel of her warm breath gusting against him – it was flawed and halting at first but it was real. All the heat and light between them concentrated there, for a time, at the juncture of their mouths. Hers gave a little against the deepening pressure from his, then pressed back heatedly, and finally opened: and then there was warmth and wet which greeted him as though he had come home from the war.

It scintillated, this kiss.  Maybe they would be all right without the sun: between them, they had this fire. Jaime touched her tongue with his and began to stroke it, gently as he knew how and hoping gently enough, for Brienne deserved gentleness and he wasn’t experienced in giving it. She pulled in a long almost gasping breath, and suddenly grasped him so closely in her arms that he knew his shoulders would be sore tomorrow.  It mattered not at all: right now, he could not imagine a way that she could touch him to which he would not consent.  He’d wanted it for so long, the touching ...  Brienne’s mouth opened further over his, and he couldn’t hold back a groan.

He was trembling a little, which would astound him later when he had time to think.  But for now, his left hand grasped Brienne’s right shoulder and he bracketed her torso with his right arm, and he tilted her until she moved down and back onto the cloak-covered straw. She pulled his over both of them and they lay on hers while he took a moment to breath and to touch her face – forehead, nose, cheeks, chin. With wonder, that he could, and that there was no guilt in it.

Her hands moved too, and after awhile his tunic was gone as well as hers.  He never stopped to ask if she was certain about doing this, because clearly she was, and that knowledge became a joy so fierce he wasn’t sure his chest could contain it.  Jaime’s breaths grew more and more labored, as she touched his chest and began exploring his body – without finesse, because it was Brienne, but also without hesitation, because it was Brienne.  It was Brienne here beneath him and entwined with him. Big Brienne, Brienne the Beauty, the Maid of Tarth; Brienne the wench who had scorned him and argued with him and forced him to cope with harsh reality; Brienne who never backed down from his verbal baiting, who had seen every corner of his being and yet stood as his surety and cared for him: Brienne the owner of the heart his esteemed most highly and the only soul with which his had ever truly resonated.  It didn’t matter that they were in a cold smelly barn, with a cow lowing nearby and a goat making curious snuffling noises.  It didn’t matter that they were both somewhat ungainly, or that he was old and tomorrow his muscles would ache.  It didn’t even matter right now that tomorrow, there might be no light and they might both be dead.

What mattered was that his wench was beneath him, sighing and beginning to moan as he touched parts of her of which he’d dreamed. What mattered was that when he kissed the inner curve of her shoulder just over the very slight rise of her breast, and then proceeded further down the firmness of her body, she pressed his face to her with both of her strong hands and arched her chest up to meet his lips. What mattered was that she liked his fingers applying just _that_ amount of pressure, right _there,_ and that she was firm in showing him exactly how to do what she needed.  what mattered was that her commanding ways inflammed him. What mattered was that when he slid his hand beneath her, clenching her warm skin and shifting muscle and adjusting her angle for his slow, deep entry into her body, she opened her eyes and met his with fierce and total commitment. 

The depth of unabashed emotion in her regard turned that heated stream in his chest into a river of fire surging through his entire body. 

With a long low groan, Jaime began to move inside her and it was exquisite torture.  Brienne’s eyes fluttered closed on a gutteral “Oh .. _oh_ ,” and her hands curled into tight fists at his shoulders.  Leaning onto his right elbow and holding onto her with his hand, Jaime could not restrain the rumbles that began to rise from his chest with each slow thrust. He saw Brienne’s head drop back, her throat arching and her mouth opening on deliciously heavy pants.  Her hands moved, to grasp his chest and his back.  She anchored her legs around his hips and across his buttocks and began using them to pull him into her forcefully, repeatedly.  He gloried in her strength, in the bulk of her muscle as it surrounded him and in the hardness of the body she was choosing to share with him. She lifted her hips to meet his, hard, each time they drove downward, and soon Jaime could not maintain the slow pace.  It built, became furious, pounding.  He tried to hold off, lifting his torso away from hers and bracing with his stump against the ground: but she raised herself up, brought their chests back together with a thud, grunted “don’t” at him, and reached down to firmly touch him.  “Ah,” he gasped out as their pace increased until it was erotically frenzied and forceful. Jaime watched Brienne hungrily and with his teeth grit tried to wait until she was there, first –

But then she was arching her back beneath him, her legs and arms clamped so strongly about him that he could feel a shoulder moving in ways it wasn’t meant to.  And he didn’t care if she dislocated his joints, he didn’t care if the tight clench of her other muscles did serious damage to more intimate parts, he only cared about the sweet pain it all gave him and that she receive as much pleasure as he could give her. Brienne’s low moan was rising to a quivering cry and she was moving violently around and against him.  He was at the end of his self-control. Gasping, Jaime barely had time to withdraw and expend onto the straw, his entire body clenching in sheer, prolonged gratification so intense it hurt.

He returned to Brienne as soon as he could.  Though obviously she knew enough of her own body to be able to meet her own needs, this was her first time with a partner; he’d be damned if he didn’t do everything he could to make it memorable and wonderful.  She was clearly unsurprised at what he did – she had been amongst soldiers for most of her adult life.  But she was beautiful in how she gave herself over to it and to him, reaching a hand to grasp and then pull on his hair.  As he brought her back to the heights, she lifted up from the straw, curling around him and clenching onto him tightly until it was difficult to breath.  But again Jaime didn’t care about any discomfort, only glorying in her sounds and her shuddering as her own acute bliss finally overwhelmed her.  Brienne was so stunning as she fell back against her fur cloak with a long growl of satisfaction that he was almost ready to go again that quickly. 

But he leaned over her, instead, and cradled the top of her head in his hand, and pressed his lips to her sweat-dampened forehead.  His heart was still thudding out a marching tempo inside his chest as he lowered himself down beside her.  She immediately turned into his body, moving a leg over his and pulling his head into her shoulder.

It was quiet, except for their breathing which gradually slowed and the occasional cow snuffle or goat bleat.  An occasional muffled thud sounded from within the house proper – perhaps the farmer’s wife was readying a meager supper - but neither of them stirred.  Jaime had rarely lain, just lain, with a woman in bed.  Right now, he shoved away all the reasons why and the sordid scent of his past.  He was with Brienne.  Clean-souled, brave-hearted, beautiful Brienne who had shared with him a world of physical affection of a type he’d never known before.    Respectful, equitable, caring and unselfish, unafraid, _loud_ with very little care if they were heard - it had been all that and more.  This that they had done - it wasn't fucking.  This was a revelation.

Jaime levered up on his right elbow to stare down at Brienne, moving the arm beneath her neck to curve about her shoulder.  She moved a hand to his bare chest, and returned his look with gentle eyes and a clear expression.  Walls down, frown gone, completely unguarded: a face she did not display to the world, but shared to him.

“Now,” he said, his voice sudden in the still air, “I will have no regrets.”

And she smiled.

 

In a few days, all that showed of the sun was a dull red-gold semi-ring above the edge of the world.  The next day, there was just a smudge of orange across the horizon.  The next day, some brightening of the sky near there.  And then finally, the following ‘morning’, nothing.  They had lost the light.

 


	21. To the Wall

There were some cardinal differences, Brienne had given Jaime to understand from her talks with Sansa and Bran, between this and the original fight against the Night King.  One of them was Viserion, or the reanimated dragon that had once been Viserion.  Obviously, it had been the one to breach the Wall and let through the dead.  More, though, with Viserion in play, no matter how many of the dead were pushed through the breach and trapped on the other side, it might not really matter.  The Night King could, perhaps, just ride the dead dragon across the Wall and raise more dead once South again, as many times as he wanted.

However, Viserion had been curiously absent in action for at least a couple of fortnights, now.  In this last, long struggle, he’d not shown claw nor tooth.  Theories abounded about it but he – it -was just … missing.  For this reason, but also because there really was no other practical strategy, Jon and Daenerys and their allied forces continued to push all the dead toward the Wall, and at long last began to successfully get some of the wights through the breach.  Brienne and Jaime’s unit were fighting was very near to the Wall, now.  It rose in sight of the entire embattled band of humans, blotting out the stars across the northern horizon. Some of the Walkers, Brienne and Jaime heard, had even been pushed through the Wall along with wights.  Humanity was so near its goal; the fighters, now well-accustomed to melees in the dark and battling it out in the frigid cold, were freshly strengthened by their expectation that the end of the war might be near.  Dozens of Maesters and hundreds of magic-infused people were working on binding up the Wall.  As soon as the Night King himself was through it, magic would snap shut across what remained open, and a mass of ice would be made to landslide down to fill in the physical gap.  The army of the living enjoined in a great push to force the mass of the dead horde and its leaders through that gap in the Wall once and for all. 

Most people were missing body parts by now, if not lost in battle then to frostbite.  Brienne so far had gotten off relatively easy, with just her smallest toe on the right foot having been amputated.  The wildling Brehag had hidden the yellowish color of his left foot from the Maesters, terrified of amputation, until his skin had blackened and begun to weep, his tissues rotting up toward his knee before the smell of decay gave him away.  In the end he lost his entire leg, and should consider himself blessed, the angry Maester told him, not to have lost his life to a blood infection. 

But Brienne kept care of herself, and when her toe lost sensation, she sensibly reported it to a Maester and had it taken care of before the problem worsened.  Stupidity would not keep her from fighting until she died or they won.  She made Jaime do the same, fight after exhausting fight.  At some point she noticed that he was no longer so beautiful.  He was missing most of his left ear and had a deep scar that began at his chin and continued down his throat.  That had been a scary one.  For a while, every time Brienne saw it, she relived the moment she was a second too late to help, the wight’s dagger swung and Jaime didn’t block it, and blood poured from his neck.  Briefly, she relived it.

The fighting did not stop, now.  The only pause in action came if your unit rotated away from the Wall.  The dead forces were entrenched.  The advance of the living slowed, until it seemed not an inch of ground was gained without a life lost.

She and Jaime did not come together again.  There was neither time nor ability.  They fought, they tended to necessary bodily functions, sometimes they slept.  The fighting was closer now to the base of the Wall, and then on both sides of it as men fought to keep the dead who’d been forced through from returning. If Brienne had had the emotional energy, she would have taken time to contemplate what they had done together aeons ago in that farmer’s barn.  But as it was, she had tucked the memory of it into a corner of her soul, to take out and consider on rare occasions in the future when she could.  Right now, she couldn’t.

Word came from Jon and Arya that, in case Viserion still lived and for some reason was just being held in reserve, back at Winterfell Sansa had had all bodies whose locations were known in the North dug up and burned.  That meant every ancestor buried in the crypt, every grave in every graveyard, high-born or common.  It had to have been hard physical work, digging through frozen ground and trying to be sure the bodies were entirely consumed.  Worse had to have been the effect on people’s souls, Brienne mused during a brief moment before sleep claimed her.

The fighting was fierce, and became fiercer as, it seemed, the Walkers grew more and more desperate while the human fighters, by contrast, became emboldened and energized.  Jaime could feel it around him in the night air, as during a brief pause in the fighting he took a deep breath and looked about him for another White  Walker.  A wight reached him first, though; he ended it easily as he had others a thousand times and moved on, towards the Wall looming ahead.  As he turned, searching, for a next target, there was swift movement in the corner of his vision – and before he could react to it, he was slammed to the ground and there was weight atop him.  He was mid-way through a vicious swing of his gold hand at a head before he realized it was _Brienne’s_ head.  He managed to redirect the blow as Brienne, one shoulder over his face and the other in his abdomen, stabbed Oathkeeper into something above and past his head; something had been coming at his back.  It shattered; he heard the shards tinkling down; and about them several wights collapsed into pieces.  The field around them briefly cleared, Brienne gazed down at him from crosswise atop him, and grinned, almost giddily.

“How are we still alive?!” she shouted into the wind, and he shook his head, laughing fiercely, feeling that same mad ecstasy of battle fire inside.  Brienne, having just saved his life for perhaps the twentieth or thirtieth time, heaved herself off him and yanked him to his feet.  They pressed on, their way and their enemies lit by the torches on the Wall and the moon above them, which reflected off any of the hard-packed snow that hadn’t been churned to gray slush or frozen gore.  Jaime had no sense of time; he did not know how long it took but they reached, eventually, the base of the Wall.  Still hacking, impaling, swinging their way through wights and Walkers, through the dead animals and humans, he and Brienne and the thousand humans about them kept going, trying to herd Walkers through the breach.

Until there was an echo of a repeated shout from far, far above, then the blast of a horn, and then a creaking noise that built on itself. Brienne paused in confusion, her sword knocking away a wight while Jaime lifted the tip of his from the ground it had dug into as it went through a Walker’s body.  Jaime comprehended and reacted before she did; he blurted, “he must be through!”, grabbed her hand, and jerked her after him into a run away from the gap toward which they’d been so exerting themselves to funnel the army of the dead.

“What?” she yelled at him, though she kept up with his strides while the creaking became a monstrous rumbling at their backs.  Her feet pounded over the ice-encrusted, rock-hard snow beneath her.

“They’re closing the gap! The Night King must be on the other side!”

“Please let it be so!” Brienne gasped out, and it was a prayer. Judging they were probably far enough away to avoid being caught in the avalanche, Jaime slowed and stopped and turned, and Brienne followed suit.  Mounds and piles of ice that had been carefully balanced and kept there at the top of the Wall on either side of the gap were coming rumbling, crashing down into the break in the Wall, filling it from side to side and spilling out into the surrounding land.   Brienne’s breath was coming in gasps, but a low hoarse cheer forced itself out of her lungs.  She jumped a little when, next to her, Jaime raised his golden hand and gaze a loud war cry.

It was only then, as she registered the lack of animated dead in their immediate vicinity, that she realized Jaime still held her hand. She vigilantly searched the landscape around them for sign of the enemy, but was far more aware of the feeling of his gloved fingers wrapped around hers.  She didn’t let go.  Something inside, something rising on the tide of battle lust and euphoria, _refused_ to let him go.  His grip didn’t loosen, either.

Brienne stared down at Jaime, the beginnings of a smile on her numb lips hidden behind her woolen scarf.  Armor had been abandoned, because in armor you froze.  Thick clothing with cured leather over top was all anyone wore anymore, fighting or no.

Before the smile was fully realized, though, there was a strange cold shriek, and from high above – from over the Wall – a rush of great wings.  With dread-tinged weariness Brienne looked up into the moonlit sky.  Torches on the Wall reflected flickering light off a flash of icy scales.  She jerked backward with a gasp.  People began to run but many of them not in time.  Before Brienne could move, Jaime had dragged her down and slammed his torso over hers.  His back took the brunt of the heat she could feel coming from over their heads.  Blue flame lit the night around them.  Mercifully, the screams were short-lived – she had seen enough deaths by blue dragon fire to know that the heat was so intense, a person was a crumble of charcoal almost before realizing they were afire.

She shoved Jaime off of her, both of them scrambling away and he beating out the flame where the back of his cloak had caught fire, but Viserion was moving away from them as well, having left a swath of death and aiming for the greater mass of fighters to the east of their position.  Brienne and Jaime paused, he beginning to look about him for a dragonglass-tipped anything.  Brienne squinted up into the darkness, then grabbed Jaime’s shoulder.

“The Night King is on him,” she blurted, “he’s riding Visierion!”

Jaime turned to look, cursing. “Where are Daenerys and her damned children?” he exclaimed.  He now held a spear, the length broken in two but the dragon glass point somehow intact.  He hefted it and Brienne followed as he turned toward Viserion’s flight path.  


	22. Under Dragon Wings

The strategic fighting groupings had fallen apart, except for those who had reasonable shelter.  Viserion looped around and dove toward the Wall, letting loose another blue blast clearly aimed at re-opening it.  But a hail of arrows from archers on the Wall blocked him.  Some of the arrows fell onto and into people on the ground, and all missed Viserion, who twisted seemingly on his tail and arched out of view into the dark, above the arrows’ flight path.  Repeatedly, though, he was blocked from his goal until, weaving up and out of sight, he seemed to give up on this section of the Wall.  Minutes later, blue flame lit the sky from a distance west – at an area of the Wall that Brienne knew had no archers. 

Though she couldn’t see that far in the dark, Brienne knew that if she could she would see another break in the once-impregnable Wall.  Despair clawed at her abdomen.  For a brief second, she and Jaime stared at each other, while around them rose cries of anger and distress.  They had no way to close another breach, not in time. All this, the pushing, the fighting, the suffering, the dying – it had been for nothing.    

The Walker closest to them seemed to have draw new impetus for its attack.  Face grim, mouth a thin tight line, Jaime broke eye contact with Brienne and turned once more in Viserion’s direction.  Brienne kept up with him and kept off him any of the dead who came against them.  But it was impossible to get close to the Walker-dragon.  Viserion would cycle in low, flame some humans, and then twist up high and out of sight in the darkness. They would only know he was returning by the flap of the enormous wings, and have bare seconds to find cover from the burning.

Until, that was, there came an additional rush of wing noise, which differentiated into another set.  For a moment Brienne could see nothing up in the air and had to concentrate on cutting down wights and shattering a Walker.  But then there was Drogon, canting in from her left, in a driving rush at Viserion.  A bundled figure clung to his back with long white braids whipping behind.  Viserion climbed into the night sky but Drogon got close enough to rake heavy claws down the ice dragon’s flank.  Lurchingly, Viserion broke away, then curled around to flame in Drogon’s direction.  It seemed to Brienne that Drogon’s wingtip was caught, but she wasn’t sure, and there was a Walker advancing toward Jaime. 

She caught snippets and flickers of the aerial struggle as they fought on beneath it.  The two mounted dragons circled, dove, flamed and clawed at each other.

And then there were three.  Three pairs of mighty wings stirring the air, until the noise was like a wind storm.  Jaime, gasping for breath after chopping arms from a wight and then quickly torching them and it, stared up in a brief space they had purchased for themselves.

“Who is that?” he demanded of Brienne, whose younger vision was more acute than his.  Brienne looked – surely not – but yes, Rhaegul also had a rider, someone in dark brown furs crouched against the dragon’s back.  Brienne stared, but could not make him out.

Drogon was arrowing in from Viserion’s left, front claws spread to attack.  Viserion withdrew upwind, and quickly, but Rhaegul had anticipated him and was already above him, dropping down fast and furious on folded wings, neck outstretched.

Viserion darted off to the side, away from them both and toward Jaime’s and Brienne’s position.  Drogon successfully kept pace while Rhaegul fell behind; the three raced toward the human on the ground and then over their heads in a rush and roar.  Viserion whipped around, dropping low to try to avoid Drogon’s fire – so low that when Rhaegul, pursuing, over flew Brienne again, she saw who his rider was.

“That’s King Jon!” she shouted at Jaime over the sound of his clashing sword.  He’d moved off from her as he struggled with a Walker and she couldn’t see him, but she’d learned the particular sound of his blade on certain surfaces and had begun to subconsciously keep track of him by it. If too long a time passed without that noise sounding, she would first become aware of anxiety and then the reason for it, and go looking for him as soon as she could.

So far, she had always found him, no matter how dark it was.  This damned war needed to be won, finally so, so that the time did not come where she went searching for him (or he for her) and found a corpse, or a burned crisp.

Jaime was close enough for now that Brienne heard his wordless cry back. They had battled their way into the thick of the fighting, it seemed; and there were a greater number of torches on the Wall which improved their sight.  Men and wights and Walkers below, kings and queen and dragons above, the air became full of the sounds of struggle and slaughter.  Metal clanged, voices rose hoarsely, happily often ice shattered.  Over it all was the swoosh and swoop of dragon wings and dragon fire - most of it, thankfully, expended in the air.  Drogon laid down one blast near the Wall where a mass of Walkers was trying to route a small human group. But for the most part the dragons concerned themselves with one another, leaving those on the ground to fight their own battles. 

At one point, Brienne found her back to the Wall’s ice, pressed in by more wights than she could handle.  In torchlight she could see Jaime, hacking desperately through from behind them; even with his help they seemed too many, but somehow he ended several and fought to her side, clearing space enough for her to maneuver.  Sword swinging again, with his assistance she took the rest of them down.

A particularly harsh dragon call drew Brienne’s gaze skyward once more.  Blue flame gave a glimpse of all three of the creatures, each with a rider still intact.  For the first time Brienne had a moment to wonder how King Jon and Queen Daenerys were still hanging on, given the wildness of the rides they were taking.  But there they were. Rhaegul gave an abrupt lunge, braving the edge of Viserion’s flame, and suddenly his vicious claws encased the side of Viserion’s head.  Viserion banked, shook, and rolled, pulling Rhaegul with him, but Rhaegul did not release.  From behind, Drogon flamed, and Viserion’s hind quarters caught.  Brienne heard Jaime’s intake of breath beside her.  Just as Rhaegul was shaken off of Viserion’s head and sent tumbling, Drogon charged too quickly for Viserion to be able to wheel and protect himself.  The larger dragon’s teeth raked across and into Viserion’s underbelly.  As they dug a deeply gaping wound into his once-brother, Drogon screamed – there was no other word for the sound.  Then he was free, wheeling up while Viserion’s body tumbled once, parachuting awkwardly on open wings, and then began a plunge toward the earth.

Below, people scattered from the expected point of impact.  Above, Rhaegul once more folded his wings and dove.  Fast, faster than Viserion’s cartwheeling descent.  As the two creatures came level, the figure of King Jon on Rhaegul’s back was now seen to move for the first time.  Rhaegul was in close enough to Viserion that he was battered by the falling dragon’s great wings, and seemed to barely keep his place. But  Jon moved again, and Brienne watched uncomprehendingly as torchlight glinted off metal flashing between the two dragon’s bodies. No, she realized abruptly, between _King_ _Jon_ and the _Night_ _King_.

Viserion fragmented.  A downward cascade of blue ice glinted briefly where he had been. Every White Walker – every single one touched by the semicircle of the nearest torch’s light - shattered at once, as though dozens of invisible Valyrian blades had suddenly been wielded on them.  Brienne stood still, Oathkeeper half-lifted in her halted hand, as a sound like an ocean of ice crashing itself on miles of rocky beach sounded in her ears. Immediately after, all wights dropped, to lay unmoving on the frozen, churned ground.

Only humans stood on the field.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first time I've tried to write an aerial battle. Got a little Dragonriders of Pern, there, lol.


	23. Celebration

Brienne came to herself with Jaime shouting at her, “That’s enough! Wench - stop!”  She realized that she had him by the shoulders and was shaking him.  Shaking him rather violently, while grinning like a fool.  Around them, not a single dead thing moved.  It did not seem real. Regaining control of her muscles, she released Jaime only to be grabbed up by him in turn and lifted one-armed from her feet in a tight hug.  He swung her in an exuberant circle, and truthfully she had not known he was that strong.  Around them was an almost thunderous roar of noise – human noise.  Cries were sounding across the field and from afar, that sounded unfamiliar and strange until Brienne realized it was because they weren’t cries of fear, aggression, or pain.  They were shouts of jubilation. 

Humans, only humans, not a Walker anywhere she could see though she turned and scanned repeatedly. Thinking back over what she’d seen happen, Brienne realized that King Jon must have killed the Night King, and that was why Viserion and the Walkers had disintegrated.  He was gone! Drogon and Rhaegul were settling down to hastily cleared land.  Brienne moved toward them without more thought in her mind.  Exhaustion momentarily gone, her heart was pounding, her head full of a strange tingling.  She and Jaime arrived to the front edge of the crowd now surging toward the dragons and their riders.  Rhaegul swung his head around, low, and Drogon hissed warning, which was enough to clear a more respectful distance.

Both King Jon and Queen Daenerys, Brienne could now see, were tied to their dragons with harnesses.  That was how they had kept from falling as the dragons dove, wheeled and raced through the air.

King Jon was kicking free of the harness.  Daenerys removed hers with more measured motions, and lifted up on her heels, raising a black-gloved hand to still the clamor of voices about her.  Silence and stillness wove back through the throng by increments.  By now, King Jon was gone from Rhaegul’s back. Once she could be heard, the Queen spoke:

“THE NIGHT KING IS NO MORE!!!” she proclaimed, and the roar of approbation from the growing mass of humanity gave her no space to say more for the next several moments.  The mob of people around them was swelling and pressing so much that Brienne grabbed for Jaime’s arm with both hands. He freed it, though, to slide it around her waist and she tilted into him and wrapped him in both of hers.  His forehead to her chin, they stood until the heaving human mass around them quieted enough that Daenerys began speaking again.

“Jon Snow, the King in the North, _your_ king, decapitated him in mid-air with Valyrian steel.  I saw it happen.  He did not shatter, but” – an ever so slight pause “- the Viserion Walker did, and the Night King’s body and head both fell to the ground.  There.” She pointed. An entire unit of burly soldiers, Brienne only now noticed, stood in a box shape facing outward, armed with swords at the ready – against other humans.  Sobered by the sight, the crowd stilled a bit. “He is barely recognizable from the impact, but it is he.  Even now, the head and body are being set aflame.”  Indeed, within moments smoke could be seen, and then a brightening glow of fire.  Then there was King Jon, moving about and gathering more guards because the crowd threatened to overwhelm him.

As it did Brienne and Jaime at its forefront.  Though they both stood with feet strongly planted and braced against the mass of ecstatic, unwashed, bloody people, they were set off balance repeatedly.  They tried to make their way out of the snarled knot of humanity but it wasn’t possible to make much headway.  So they stood, bracing each other, arms around one another, waiting for the truth to sink in. 

With time, though, there came a little space, and some abatement of the crowd’s restless movement.  These were men and women who’d been fighting in the dark and cold, on rations and little sleep, some of them for months without relief.  Bodies eventually made their needs known.  Higher-ranking leaders and their entourages were admitted to the Wall’s interior, though it was slow going by small lots.  Brienne may have counted as a member of that group, but Jaime perhaps still did not, and the line was long to even ask.  So they instead made their way a few miles south to the longhouses that had been constructed in the past weeks.  The first several were already packed.  They finally found a small corner in one of them, crammed in with several others.  It was indescribably rank with body odor, but it was warm.  They curled up around one another and slept.

They each woke again four hours later, their brains too trained to short sleeping periods, but for once they did not have to rise and enjoin battle.

There was no battle to join.

It was strange.

Though others were stirring in the semi-darkness, those closest to them remained asleep. Jaime turned, careful not to brush the sleeping people surrounding them, until he faced Brienne, his chest to hers.  She worked her arms around his back and for a moment, in the yellow light from the fire pit in the room’s center, they stared at each other.  They were silent for a bit.

“Is this real?” Jaime finally wondered in a whisper.  Brienne’s mouth quirked.

“It would seem so,” she murmured.  She took and then let out a long, slow breath.  Jaime tilted his forehead in until it rested against her clavicle. 

“The dead no longer move.  The Night King is gone,” he marveled. “We live.  We are here.”

“We are here together,” Brienne dared.  And even though she _knew_ Jaime’s heart towards her, her own tripped in its pacing.  Jaime released a long, low sound that was not quite a growl, but was affirmation, and Brienne felt a corresponding spill of warmth spread through her chest.  She tilted her head so that her cheek could brush his hair.  Jaime’s arms tightened about her.

“I don’t know what my situation will be, with the fighting over.  But I do – I know what I want it to be.”

Brienne cleared her throat.  But Jaime was still talking.  “If it is at all possible, I want to be with you.  Maybe you know that, but I want it clear.  I want you.” He breathed, long and deep, twice; the breaths gusted warmly over her skin.  “Even if there were other options – old options – available, those – she – wouldn’t be what I want.  I only want you.”  A little ragged, the words, but firm.

Brienne had difficulty pulling in her next breath. She closed her eyes against the warm wet suddenly threatening the corners of her eyes.  She pressed her cheek tightly to the top of Jaime’s head.  It was good, to have him bring up what was unspoken between them.  It was very good, to hear him describe his sister as an ‘old option’. 

To hear his sincere, fervent voice saying ‘I want to be with you’ – that, that was excellent.

Jaime fell silent.  After a few moments, he drew his head back so that he could look up at her.  “You have nothing to say?” he prompted, with a cocky eyebrow to cover the real uncertainty she could hear.

“I will speak with Lady Sansa,” Brienne assured him, wondering if he could see the tears that hadn’t fallen. 

He nodded slowly.  “But what do you _want_?”

Brienne blinked.  He didn’t know? After what they’d done together in that farmer’s barn, after all these months of fighting and sleeping and being together, after all these years of always finding their way back to each other, he wasn’t sure of this? 

She reviewed his face.  No, he wasn’t sure.  Her heart twisted.

“Jaime,” she breathed, and her hands fisted on his back as if to anchor him to her forever.  “I want you with me. I have since the first time I had to leave you.  I always shall.”

He searched her eyes, for a moment, gleaning the depth of her honesty, and then sighed out his release.  “That’s good, then,” he managed, after clearing his throat and swallowing.  His grin, still beautiful despite his other disfigurements, flashed at her.

And it was.  No matter how King Jon, Queen Danaerys or Lady Sansa determined their fates, and despite the fact that neither of them had control over those decisions, it was good to have these things said aloud.  To be clear, and to know.  Together or apart, they were for each other.  In the dim light and warmth and each other’s arms, it was enough. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter - Pod returns. In case you've been wondering where he is.


	24. Convalescing

It seemed the entire continent wanted to come to Winterfell. People from the remains of various houses, people from Dorne, from Braavos and the Iron Bank, all converged on the fortress as days passed.

No one came from King’s Landing. Pod marked that, and heard speculation about it. He wondered, because either Cersei brought her forces to fight before the Northern ones could march South, or she waited for them to come to her. Surely her best option was to advance North first?  He was no strategist, but Pod contemplated this as he made his way slowly, carefully, down the steep stone steps toward the Great Hall.  

He was getting better at maneuvering with the cane, but stairs were still problematic.  When he’d first arrived back at Winterfell months ago, missing his entire left leg with much of his left arm and that side of his torso a burned mess, he’d fully expected to die, and quickly.  Somehow, that hadn’t happened.  He’d improved, begun to heal, and now here he was, struggling with basic activities like walking, like making the burned and nerve-damaged left hand grasp the wall while his uninjured right one held the head of the cane. It took a full quarter of an hour but he made it into the main room where breakfast was being served, just as others were beginning to filter in.  

It was all about the preparation, he thought as he moved to a bench.  He leaned his cane against it and slid himself in on one side of it.  He’d simply had to rise an hour earlier (dressing was still problematic) and get walking earlier than he’d have needed, had he been hale.

There was pain, just pain all the time down his left side and into parts that were no longer even there.  For awhile Pod had swum in a foggy sea of milk of the poppy, during which he could tell the pain was still there, he just didn’t care.  At the time he hadn’t minded the strangeness of that, either, but as he improved and the Maester made him decrease the amount he drank, Pod had returned to his senses.  Last week, he’d weaned himself entirely off the stuff.  He was taking other remedies for pain, ones that were less powerful, and his head was more clear except for days when he was muzzy-headed from lack of sleep due to pain.

That same week, he’d finally walked all the way down and out of the keep, into the courtyard.  One of the Maester’s assistants had attended him that first time, lending an arm to lean on when the cane wasn’t quite enough.  Once, Pod knew, there had been a village outside Winterfell’s wall – Winter Town.  Many of its denizens were gone, off fighting the dead; and those who remained had moved inside the walls for the protection they and the castle’s guard afforded.There were makeshift structures of wood still standing, but the people had been there long enough that some clay and mortar ones had also been put up.  Pod and the assistant had stood in full moonlight, that day, while Pod looked about but kept to the shadows of buildings.  Despite being out and about he wasn’t yet much for company, and most definitely did not feel up for conversation with strangers.

There was a small square set up with a few stalls for bartering goods and services.  People were congregated here, under a wood and straw roof, with collective body heat and their few animals and a small fire providing some warmth.  Someone had set up an ingenious time-keeping device involving gears and a pointer, and apparently it was mid-afternoon.  Those clustered within smelled, as most did nowadays from keeping so many of their clothes on all the time; and even beneath the layers of clothing it was clear that everyone was quite thin.  

Many of those living in the shanty town were women, and a group of them walked by, snow crunching underfoot, gossiping and not noticing the two men standing in the darker of the dark places.  So much more skulkery – intentional or not – was possible when day never came.  

“… little lord,” Pod heard as they approached, and without conscious thought he attended to the woman’s words. One of her friends snorted.  

“I was hoping to get me some dwarf!  Disappointing, it is.  He really ain’t been to the brothel, not once?”

Pod almost snorted, himself.  The ‘brothel’ was clearly the small shack across the square from him.  It appeared to have enough space to accommodate one couple lying down, and not much else.

The third woman shook her head.  “Not once.  Ain’t messing around with anyone else, neither.  Ain’t been down here except to go to the yard and practice with that axe and then head right back in to the keep.  Mia works in the kitchen, and she says he ain’t fucked any of them inside women, neither. Nobody, not since he got back from that trip to the Iron Bank!”

Blinking, Pod watched them turn a corner, chattering about their disappointment and disbelief.  Pod had some difficulty with the idea, himself. Tyrion wasn’t engaging in his favorite pastime? Was he ill?

This morning, the Queen’s Hand quickly found him at the table he’d settled down onto.  He often did, these days.  At first it had seemed to be for Pod’s talk of the fighting and of Jaime, and Lady Brienne.  But Pod had no new stories, now, and even back when he’d first arrived and been bed-ridden and insensible Lord Tyrion had visited often.  

Seating himself across from Pod now, Tyrion nodded and lifted his cup to his nose, sniffing it.  He sighed.  “Watered milk, again.”

Pod had already drunk his, and shrugged.  He’d become accustomed to the thin stuff.  As he began to dig into his own food, Tyrion looked up over his head and something in the man’s eyes changed.  

“Good morning, my lady,” he said, causing Pod to lurch forward and grasp the table’s edge to try to quickly rise to his feet.

Foot.

“Please don’t,” said Lady Sansa’s voice from behind him, and a moment later the Lady herself circled around the table and seated herself at Tyrion’s side.  “You don’t stand on ceremony for Lord Tyrion.”

Pod winced, at that, and began an apology at his lack of protocol, but she shook her head.  

“No need. I am telling you, unless we are in court or ceremony, don’t.” The Lady frowned at him.

Pod nodded uneasily.  Lady Sansa, he noted, had no more nor better food in her trencher than did he or anyone else in the room.  She nodded to Lord Tyrion, who afforded her a deep head bow and then applied himself to his food.  

Breakfast was gruel made from rye flour, with small pieces of pool-grown carp as a treat.  Pod crunched his dry bread with thankfulness for the measly meal.  People out in the hinterlands, he had heard, were starting to truly starve.

Lady Sansa and Lord Tyrion spoke quietly together, not much looking at one another.  After some minutes of observing them, Pod’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. The two of them sitting there side-by-side, touching not at all, were somehow in contact.  Pod could see it, how they made little gestures that meant they were conscious of each other, how they attended when the other was speaking, how they backed each other up in conversation, how just every once in awhile their eyes caught and held and communicated … something.

Were Lord Tyrion and Lady Sansa together, somehow?  He’d heard nothing of the sort.  But sitting here watching them, he wondered.

He finished breakfast before they did, as they were doing more talking than he.  As he reached for the cane to use it to lever himself up from the bench, there came a growing murmur of voices from outside the hall.  Pod and Lord Tyrion looked up as a maid, wide-eyed and flushed, appeared at Lady Sansa’s arm.

“The Maester says come, now!” she exclaimed.  Lady Sansa rose to her feet, a concerned frown slight on her brow.

“A raven came from Castle Black,” Pod heard the servant continue.  At that, Lord Tyrion rose from the table as well and followed after the Lady.  

Pod gathered himself and did likewise, at his halting pace. By the time he entered the corridor, he saw that the Maester had not waited for Lady Sansa to come to him.  Whatever this news was, it was of import.  Dread-filled excitement clenched Pod’s chest.

Lady Sansa gazed down at the unscrolled paper she held.  She blinked, Pod saw as he neared through the grouping of servants who were there.  Then she reached seemingly without her awareness for Lord Tyrion who was at her side.  The Lord gave her his hand while she tilted the message in his direction.

Tyrion let out an alarming bellow the likes of which Pod had never heard from him, and there were tears in the Maester’s eyes. But Lady Sansa, now, was smiling. Smiling, and her hand gripped Lord Tyrion’s so tightly his fingers were turning purple.

“Thank the gods,” Pod heard the Maester mumble, as he dashed at the tears on his cheeks.  

Suspecting now, joy beginning to thrum through his body, Pod still did not know for sure until Sansa called for riders and the few precious mules left.  “Go as fast as you can,” she bid them, standing before the now-sizable crowd, “The Night King is defeated! The army of the dead Walks no more!”

Hours later, after the hasty sending of ravens and the impromptu festival that had begun, Lord Tyrion was still in Lady Sansa’s orbit.  As giddy as people generally were, Pod didn’t think anyone else much noticed.  But his earlier suspicions seemed confirmed now, as Lord Tyrion remained unobtrusive but unmovably at her side or not far off from her.

Sometime many hours into the frenetic celebration, nowhere near as drunk as he would have been after a similar party before Winter due to the limited alcohol available, Pod extricated himself from a group of serving women.  He hadn’t had the kind of physical impulse they were trying to incite since Viserion’s fire had so grievously injured him.  By all accounts, that damned dragon was truly gone, he thought savagely.  He hadn’t, until tonight, had the energy or desire to wonder if life would return to his cock.

In a quieter corridor, Pod felt exhaustion edging in, but he knew he would not be able to sleep for hours yet.  Instead, he moved toward areas of the Castle that he hadn’t frequented.  Eventually he was on the covered bridge connecting the great Keep to the armory.  It was chilled, but he stood at its window, clearing it of frost and then looking down over the yard into which, despite the cold, the festivities had long since spilled.  There was a wasteful use of wood for the sake of a number of warming fires there.  People danced about them to the sound of music, singing, cheering, the occasional fight, and the occasional fuck.  It all reached his ears as he leaned against the wall there, careful not to overset his balance, and watched for a long time.

He wondered if Day would ever be seen again.  Perhaps now there was a possibility of the sun returning?  But for tonight, it was enough and more than enough that the dead army and its King no longer threatened the living.  

Finally, feeling true sleep calling at the edges of his mind, Pod turned to go.  As he re-entered the Great Keep, a few feet from the door, he heard voices in the dim and otherwise deserted hallway.  Lord Tyrion and Lady Sansa came into view, and Pod turned the other direction, just wanting his bed.  

But then he paused.  The other two, here where they expected to be alone, were walking with hands clasped.  Lady Sansa paced herself to Lord Tyrion’s shorter legs, and her chin was tilted down mostly toward him instead of ahead to their path.  Tyrion glanced up to her frequently.  Lady Sansa was … soft, Pod thought, and having never seen her so he was halted from moving away.  They clearly did not see him, there in the shadows, and he should go.  But Tyrion – Pod saw him look up to Sansa and smile, not his usual jaded or ironic one, but a true, open, vulnerably happy smile.  Sansa paused, and so Tyrion did as well, still gripping her hand.

“It’s difficult to believe he came through alive,” Tyrion murmured.  Sansa had been carrying a small torch, and now fitted it into a nearby wall anchor.  

“When they get back, I expect you will find that was largely due to Brienne of Tarth’s intervention.” Her tone was calm, but her eyebrow was arched, and Pod got the impression that this was Lady Sansa teasing.  Indeed, Lord Tyrion chuckled.  But then his expression turned more serious.

“How will he be received?”  he asked.  Lady Sansa tilted her head.

“I think well enough,” she replied.  “He’s proved himself repeatedly, remained on the front lines, obeyed orders, fought well, saved lives; their unit is of mixed origin but functional, and so many of us are lost now … I am praying that from here out, all who fought the dead will be counted Northerners.”

Tyrion’s jaw flexed as he gazed ahead into the darkness.  For a moment Pod tensed, thinking he’d been noticed – but no.  Tyrion spoke again, solemnly.

“He only asked to be able to fight the dead.  I believe he expected to die in that fight.  Now that the fight is done, I don’t know what he can do or where he can go.  He can’t return to the South.  If he and Brienne have attached themselves to each other, and her place is at your side …”

The Lady nodded, slowly. She lifted and pressed Tyrion’s hand with both of hers.

"Jon and I are agreed that he will have a place here for as long as he desires.  In our last communications, I – I pushed, on that front.”

Tyrion tiled his chin up, seeking out Sansa’s face.  “You pushed, my Lady?” He cleared his throat.  “Why did you push?”

Sansa drew a slow breath, and her voice was very quiet. “Because he is all the family you have.  You want him here.  You should have him here.”

The expression on Lord Tyrion’s face went beyond gratitude.  Pod felt a prickling behind his eyes, at the fierce softness there.   Lord Tyrion gave the finely boned hand still tucked into his a small tug.  

“Please come down here, my lady.”  His voice rasped.

Lady Sansa breathed deeply again, sinking elegantly down voluminous skirt and all to kneel there on the granite floor.  

“Like this, my lord?” she murmured.  

Lord  Tyrion stepped in to her, crowding her skirt which enveloped his boots. “Just like that,” he sighed, “so I can reach you.”

Pod swallowed against a dry throat as he saw both of Lady Sansa’s arms come about Tyrion, pressing into his back.  Tyrion quietly rumbled his approval.  They were so connected – Pod felt something warm and melty in his own chest, seeing how soft Sansa’s gaze on Tyrion was, and how gentle Tyrion’s fingers were, stroking along her jaw and down the line of her neck.  

Sansa tilted her head down while sliding her hand up to brush it over Tyrion’s shoulder.  Tyrion was the one to take a deep breath, now, and Sansa’s eyes dropped down between them where the action moved his chest against hers, and then in a gesture that tightened Pod’s throat she leaned her head down onto Tyrion’s shoulder.  In return Tyrion tilted his chin into her, his hands moving on her back to gently gather her loose hair into his fist and just hold it, while they held each other.  

After a long moment there in the warm yellow torchlight, Tyrion spoke again, his voice breaking a little.  

“I believe – I hope – Jaime will not be all the family I have.”

Sansa’s arms about him tightened, and as the two turned into each other Pod lost the view of their faces, and shook free of the spell they had cast over him.  He made some unavoidable noise, moving away with his cane, but the couple behind him were too engaged with one other to notice.


	25. Returned to Winterfell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People - I don't know how realistic this chapter is, maybe not at all. But it's where my heart and my brain put these two, so here you go.

Winterfell was full to bursting by the time Jaime and Brienne arrived. Their unit had mostly filtered off into Winter Town, which was filling up again, but there were still numerous people milling about outside the fortress walls and outside the Town proper.  Perhaps they were all just glad to be able to be out of walls without fear of a wights or Walkers.

Tyrion must have been notified of their approach well in advance of their arrival, for just outside the East Gate in the moonlight Jaime spied his stocky blond-headed shape striding quickly toward them, with a torchbearer to the side to cast more light along his path. Weary from the journey, and the war, and recent emotional contemplation of his unsettled future, Jaime nevertheless felt his heart rise in joy at the sight of his brother. They met, toe to toe, and Jaime bent without hesitation for a strong hug. An extended hug.

Brienne stood to the side, quiet and observant. When Jaime and Tyrion parted some minutes later, she nodded her head to the small lord, who dipped his chin in return. Brienne's soft smile, seldom seen by most, was in evidence. There was a certain wetness standing Tyrion's eyes.

“Lady Brienne,” Tyrion articulated, and Brienne let out a half-laugh at a title she hadn't heard in a very long while. But -

“Lord Tyrion,” she returned, and clocked her head sideways at Jaime, who took a moment to wipe surreptitiously at one escaped tear. “He is not undamaged, but I’ve brought him back mostly intact.”

Tyrion nodded on a long measured breath. “As I see. You are indeed as good to your word and … your heart … as people say.”

Jaime’s current lightness of spirit was intensified when all Brienne did in response to Tyrion's purposely laden words was tip her lips in a small, sideways smile and twinkle her eyes down at his brother. She _twinkled,_ she did. Jaime couldn't restrain a laugh; he’d never seen her do that.

Brienne cast her gaze back to him, first questioning, and then somehow cocky. _Yes_ , her expression told him, _I’m happy to be with you and I’m going to be open about it._

And Tyrion - he was smiling as if his own life wishes were being fulfilled. Jaime sighed. He might not know what life was to be from here out, but this moment, with these two most important people, was a good one.

They made their way to and through the courtyard, which was crowded and had sprouted buildings since Jaime was last here. Those were definitely a security risk, and Jaime expected King Jon would have them gone soon. Through the numerous individuals moving about, he spied Lady Sansa waiting by the door of the Keep.  Tyrion trended to her seemingly without thought, Jaime noted.

Sansa’s and Brienne's greetings were more restrained, and Jaime knew Brienne was as tired as he was. But Sansa beckoned them inside, to meals and as much rest as sitting amongst clamoring requests for battle tales could provide. Brienne seated herself next to Lady Sansa, and at one point the two of them could be seen with their heads bent together, Brienne murmuring for only Sansa to hear and the Lady nodding slowly. When Brienne finished, Sansa laid a hand on the warrior’s upper arm and squeezed it. But then she said more, something to make Brienne frown.

Jaime suspected this was the promised ‘talk to Lady Sansa’.  Brienne had certainly wasted no time!  His heart thumped, but when Brienne looked down the table to him it wasn't happiness in her face. A sense of dread of which he'd been dimly aware suddenly pushed itself to the front of his mind.

The scant fare tasted good to two people who’d been on field rations for so long, though Jaime suddenly found his appetite waning. As they ate, Sansa and Tyrion together ran interference between two of the war’s most recognizable warriors and the denizens of the Keep who wanted information about the battles and loved ones who had fought in them.

“Brienne,” Sansa said after the plates were empty, “Right now there is little space available. I’ve made you a place in my rooms.  Ser Jaime, you will need to room with Tyrion.”

Brienne’s face closed down some, but carefully, and Jaime knew it was to not display the reaction he was having. Though their last time at Winterfell they’d of course roomed separately, he hadn't yet thought so far as to where they were to sleep now. To not sleep with each other was going to be strange after so many months together in the field.  However, the arrangements were deemed equitable, and the two returned fighters were bundled off by Pod (who had arrived partway through their meal to extend happy greetings) to try to rest. They weren't given a chance to speak together.

But Brienne sought out Jaime, who woke before her, it seemed as soon as she herself was awake.

“We will need to talk with King Jon,” she said baldly, without preamble, upon finally locating him in a corner of the yard having just parted from an extension of the reunion with Pod.

He blinked at her.

“Dd you sleep well?” he asked teasingly, pointedly at her lack of greeting. She just frowned and continued on.

“Let's try to get an audience today.”

Jaime drew close to her, though not as close as he wanted to be given their public - dark though it was - setting. He knew what the audience was for, but she was being so forceful he couldn't resist poking at her urgency, a bit.

“You’re very serious.  Regarding?” he asked, eyebrows arched inquiringly. She gave him her patented “I-know-you’re-not-stupid-why-are-you-acting-it’ soft glare. “Regarding _us_ ,” she nevertheless clarified. Seriously.

‘Us’. The word came so naturally to her lips and sounded so right.  He tipped his head to indicate his plan of walking back into the Keep. Brienne turned her head briefly in that direction, but she didn't lose her focus on Jaime. She was in forward mode, and he knew from experience she couldn't be gainsaid in this state.

“All right,” he acceded, and fell in line with her as she headed, not to the Keep, but to the Great Hall.

The King and Queen had been back for some days before Brienne’s and Jaime's arrival, and today, with the straggles of House heads who were still intact and had made it here, there was a gathering convened to begin to discuss how to move forward. Jaime expected chief among those discussions would be what to do about Cersei. He swallowed; he both desperately wanted to know what was decided and dreaded finding out.

More intensely – more seriously - though, he needed to know if there was any hope for what he and Brienne had discussed after the last battle. By some miracle, might he be permitted to stay in Brienne's orbit? Or would his past, his perceived character, and his distasteful family connections acquire more importance in people's minds now that the Night King was gone?

His chest tightened around his heart at how clearly high on Brienne's list of priorities was securing them a future with some type of togetherness in it.

At the edge of those standing at the back of the Hall, Brienne gestured for Jaime to wait. She pressed forward to where chairs were set along tables lining two walls, forming a U with the front of the room where King Jon and Queen Daenerys were seated. Jaime stayed where she had bid him and realized, belatedly, that he didn't know precisely for what she was going to ask. Perhaps places together in the same military unit? Cersei's forces, even though she'd lost the Golden Company, still had to be fought. He did _not_ want to be part of a march on King’s Landing. But to be at Brienne's side, he would.

He watched as Brienne requested her audience, and it appeared it was granted as she moved off to the side to await the close of the current discussion. That didn't come quickly: the talk regarded the disposition of fighters returning from battle, some of them needing much support due to their disabilities but many of them now without family to provide that support.  Lord Hornwood didn't want them ‘cluttering his keep’. Seriously, was the man made of stone?  On the other hand young Lady Mormont thought she could take some in, but in limited quantities.

After a preliminary resolution seemed to have been found and agreed to, there were a number of personal requests from different lords. Jaime guessed that the discussion about King's Landing must be over, then. After 4 or 5 individuals had their turn at bringing requests, everyone at the front of the room stood to their feet as Missandei declared it time for luncheon.  As most people filtered out, Missandei beckoned to Brienne. Brienne briskly motioned to Jaime in turn and they both followed the king, queen, queen's hand, and Lady Stark out of the hall and into a much smaller audience room.

The women, excepting Brienne, sat. The men stood. Jaime went to Brienne's side, reluctant to hover at the back of the room and leave her to she fight for them on her own. But he knew enough, by now, to keep quiet and let her take the lead.  Which she did, shoulders straight, arms at her side, feet widely stanced.

“King Jon, what do you intend to do with Jaime Lannister?”

Jaime winced. Baldly put, and - ‘do with’? Again, _seriously_ \- it was as if he were an acquired, awkward item in need of disposal.

Well, and perhaps that was the mere truth. He only prayed the disposal would be toward Brienne and not away from her.

King Jon leaned to murmur to Danaerys, then looked solemnly on Brienne.

“That's not yet been decided.”

Brienne nodded shortly and continued just as bluntly as she'd begun.

“I request to be married to him.”

Beat.

What?

Jaime's breath left him in a rush. 

Another beat, with silence in the room. Now, as if she'd only been standing in order to make the request, Brienne seated herself. She had to move away from Jaime to do so. 

Jaime didn't know what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't that. Yes, they were connected to and for each other, but that was largely – until this moment – a private matter between the two of them. Brienne braving insults and public opinion to fight at his side – and even lay at his side – was one concern.  Braving the same to append herself to him legally, to be called by his name and wear his House colors, to be espoused to one so far removed from the current inner circle of which she was a part; this kicked everything she was going to have to deal with up another entire level. And it was so much less likely to be granted – what was she thinking? His jaw descended, because he needed his mouth to be open for any air to make it to his lungs.  He took in a large, gusting breath that tremored over the tripping of his heart and the sudden cantillation in his head of _please, please, please_ that soon overwhelmed his initial _do I want this?_

Did he want the surest, most permanent way to ensure he never had to be permanently parted from this woman?    Did he want to make public his devotion to her and hers to him?  Did he want their union to be codified, recognizable and recognized by any they encountered? Did he want a formal, labeled, officially approved family with her?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, his soul cried to his head which asked the questions, and a thousand times more, yes.

But on the heels of that self-knowledge came the certainty that this would never be granted.  Hope was lifting its head from the dust of his spirit, but hope was an enemy.  Jaime stomped on it.

Sansa and Tyrion traded a glance, neither of _them_ looking especially shocked. Jon - his eyes narrowed, and Daenerys’s lips firmed together.

“Lady of Tarth,” she began, inclining her head perhaps an inch forward from its regal alignment with her board-straight spine, “we are inclined to grant you anything you ask, for your faithfulness to Lady Sansa and in the fight against the Night King’s forces.  It must be said, as well, that Ser Jaime Lannister did his part in that fight and by all reports seems quite inseparable from you.”  The Queen paused, surveying Brienne almost as she would an odd specimen of flora or fauna from a foreign land.  “For some – possibly for many – his recent actions overshadow those that are further in the past.  However, it is my experience that character runs true.  And his character, up until the past few years, has historically shown itself to be execrable.”

None of this was unexpected from the woman whose father he had impaled through the back, but Jaime was biting so hard on his back teeth that he could feel them grinding.  He put effort into lightening that; wherever he ended up, he did not need to face it with a broken tooth or two.

“We know you as a woman of honor,” Daenerys continued, more gently now, sitting back in her chair.  “Are there, perhaps, any honorable causes that would bring you to seek out marriage to this man?”

Brienne frowned, and Jaime saw his own confusion in her face.  What, exactly was the Queen asking?  She clearly was going somewhere with this question, but Jaime couldn’t see where that was.

“I’m uncertain what you mean, your majesty.”  Her tone was stilted and brittle.  Clumsy.  Jaime ached to help her, but he could only make the situation worse.

Daenerys looked to no one else, but Jaime felt her attention suddenly on him.  “There have been tales, Lady.  Men who say that this man” – a nod, now, in Jaime’s direction “- stole your virtue.”

Ah. Understanding now, Jaime’s muscles wilted somewhat.  He let out a sigh. _Seriously_ , he thought again, to make the word the theme of his afternoon.

But Brienne’s muscle tension only heightened.  She clearly had not been prepared for such a turn to her audience with the Queen and the Warden of the North  She stood abruptly to her feet, blinking, her face slowly turning red – Jaime could tell it was in anger, but to everyone else in the room it would look like embarrassment.  He moved toward her, taking three steps before Brienne held a hand up in his direction. He stopped; she looked at him over the head of Tyrion who stood between them.  Her eyes were fierce.  She shook her head; unhappily, he nodded, and acquiesced to her wordless instruction to stay where he was.  He prayed to the Seven she knew what she was doing.

“He did not _steal_ anything,” Brienne twisted back toward Daenerys abruptly and flung the words at her firmly.  “I freely gave what I desired to give; heart, soul, and yes, body. And so did he.  Are you telling me that THAT is the problem? Indeed, we fucked, and I hope to do so again.  Repeatedly.”

There weren’t any audible gasps, just a moment of total silence as clearly no one in the room knew how to respond to _that._ Daenerys’s face became a stone.  Jon looked distressed, but since that was baseline for him, Jaime didn’t pay it much heed. Sansa put a hand to her mouth, and Tyrion glanced around the room, finally choosing a chair into which to settle and tilting his chin onto his hand as if he were observing a production of a play.

As for Jaime - he knew there were tears in his eyes again, and he didn’t care who saw them.  _O my love._ She was magnificent, was his Brienne, and he was so far from deserving her the distance could not be measured.  But still, she chose him publicly and defiantly.

Daenerys recovered first, standing to match Brienne and advancing about the room, walking toward Jaime while facing her.

“I suppose it’s understandable, for a woman like you, to be swayed when wooed by a man of Ser Jaime’s charm and appearance.  But Lady Tarth, you are by all accounts an intelligent woman. Please tell me that you understand that any charms he’s worked on you may have been out of a desire for nothing more than saving his own hide.  Not out of any affectionate feeling for you.  Men like him don’t feel true affection.”

Jaime, who had begun to seethe at what initially seemed insult to Brienne, settled some when he heard Daenerys’s last sentence.  If it was his character, not Brienne’s desirability, that the queen was disputing, he could deal with that.

Brienne watched Daenerys talk, then slowly shook her head.  She had cooled some from her outburst, and now though her fists were still clenched there was deliberate measure to the pacing of her words. “If indeed saving his hide were the only reason,” she said, “I still might request this.  It is a hide worth saving.”

Jaime’s throat felt obstructed, and he found a need to swallow hard.  Daenerys frowned and interrupted Brienne to address Jaime.

“This is a good woman and a rare one, a lady and a warrior who has only ever proven herself honorable and true.  You have been honorless, a faithless incestuous regicidal pedicidal scoundrel.  Did you try to deceive her into taking you on as a husband? Did you lay with her under false pretenses? Aren’t you ashamed!?”

Ashamed. He. Seriously! Jaime’s breath huffed out of his mouth.  He turned his head away from Brienne to stare down at Daenerys, honestly astonished at the question.  “My lady,” he replied slowly, his bemusement creating a perplexed wrinkle between his brows, “if you knew me at all, you would know that ‘shame’ is not an emotion to which I am often prone.  However, of all the actions in my entire life which ought perhaps to have caused shame – some of which you have just labeled” – he paused, to allow the recall of the long and despicable list she had just voiced to have its full emotional impact, and for the logical fallacy in her words to be recognized by everyone in the room.  Each person here was intelligent in one manner or another; it did not take long. 

He continued, his words scratching his throat, unable to look at Brienne just now.  Damn them all for being here, for interfering in this, and for being privy to his most private thoughts.  But while he damned them, neither did he choose to hide any of what he was feeling, from them, about Brienne.  She did not deserve that. “- of _all_ of them, I am the least ashamed of this.”  His voice shook a bit.  “To have a chance to give myself over completely to the best person I know, to follow her into honorable pursuits, to align myself with someone of such a clearly beautiful and righteous soul?  I am thoroughly _un_ ashamed _._   Lady, I am _proud_.” 

It was simple, straight truth, as straight as he knew how to be.  Words done, he was now able to look to Brienne, which he did uncertain of her reaction to his having reciprocated her public statement of sentiments.  But her blue eyes were glowing, fiercely, and she was moving towards him.  She reached him in a few steps, and tipped her chin down at him once, firmly, and his facial muscles relaxed enough that he was able to grin back.

Daenerys, he realized belatedly, had returned to her seat.  Her former aggressive posture was now back to its typical reserved self-assurance.  She even reclined back into her chair, and with a flicking glance over to Lady Sansa, she nodded.  Once.

What was that?  Had her words to Brienne and to him been yet another fucking test?

He was sick of being tested.  He wanted out of here.  But Brienne was at his side, and they were close to something important, and hope was an enemy that was gaining the upper hand in his chest.

Jon stepped forward.  “You may marry,” he said simply, and went to the side bar where tea was laid out.

It was four full heartbeats before Jaime understood what he had said, and three more before he and Brienne were staring at each other.

 _Seriously?_ he almost said aloud with sarcasm and disbelief, and stifled it, and that was good because Brienne was scintillating down at him and Tyrion was laughing, softly, to himself while Sansa smiled a small smile and Jaime was beginning to believe it. He was going to have Brienne and she was going to have him.

Seriously.


	26. A Final Campaign

A raven was sent to Tarth, immediately.  Upon receiving one back – Lord Selwyn had questions, but mostly wanted confirmation that this was what his daughter truly desired – Brienne was permitted use of one of the precious magical candles to communicate directly to him that she wanted Jaime, that she was the one asking for this marriage.  The parties being who they were, the politics had to be worked out, but that was accomplished with rather more speed than would have been the case before the Great War or the Long Night.  And then they married, simply and quickly without her father present because they would soon be marching south and wanted to be officially unified before that. They made their vows in the godswood, lit by torches and a full moon, with a septon and friends and family present.  It was good enough, and just good. 

In less than twenty-four hours they marched south.

Lord Tarth, after having stood isolationist since King Renly’s death, had sent forces to join his daughter’s chosen side when the Wolf, Dragon, and Golden forces faced the Night King and his dead.  Now, he agreed as part of the pact around Brienne’s and Jaime’s marriage to support the sack of King’s Landing. Sansa still recalled Brienne’s face when she reunited with her father on Tarth before the final movements to King’s Landing.  It still twisted partially buried but long-held emotions of loss inside her.  That night in a room in Evenfall Hall Sansa wept as she had had very little freedom to do, wept for her father and mother and brothers and all she had lost.  She wept with Tyrion’s arms about her shoulders, leaving trails of snot on his shirt and wetting his neck with a running spring of tears.  The man of words offered very few in between pats to her shoulder blades and a low warm hum from the back of his throat.  After a long time, when she had exhausted her store of tears and lay soft and wilted against his chest, Sansa looked up to Tyrion’s face and saw that not all the tears had been hers.

With a hand that trembled a bit, Sansa reached up and wiped at the dampness on Tyrion’s cheek. He blinked down at her, eyes soft and expression tender.  _How is it,_ Sansa wondered as she met his gaze, _that others so much more worthy of life and love are gone, lost, and I am here being held by this good, true man?  Why should I be the one to have this?_

But it was an unanswerable question.  The care in Tyrion’s countenance was deepening, warming further, until Sansa had to close her eyes against the intensity of it. She tilted her forehead in until it was tucked in between Tyrion’s jaw and his shoulder, and if her arms clenched him too tightly for comfort he didn’t remark about it.  Instead he smoothed his chin across her hair and cradled her until she fell asleep.

Just down the hall from Tyrion and Sansa, Brienne and Jaime had been given the room Brienne had most often used as a young girl.   Being one of the marginally warmer places in Westeros, Tarth had taken in some of those who’d come South for just that reason.  It wasn’t as full as Winterfell had recently been, but there also wasn’t a lot of extra space. 

“It is as I told you.”  Brienne turned from the stand holding the bowl of lukewarm salt water she’d used to quickly bathe.  She was shivering in her underthings and quickly moved to draw clothing about her while Jaime performed his own ablutions.  Jaime knew that she had been aware that he’d been, while not precisely nervous, certainly pessimistic about Lord Tarth’s reception of the man who’d married his one and only daughter without even making an appearance before him.  Selwyn had, after all, much reason to disdain his daughter’s husband.  But after their conversation via candle Brienne had sent a raven with a long message for her father, and in it she’d frankly detailed Jaime’s actions toward her, from beginning to now.  Brienne was sure that this would soften Lord Tarth’s heart. 

Jaime wasn’t so certain, and didn’t fail to make this known.  Also, preparing to deal with a disapproving father figure kept his mind off where they were headed – to King’s Landing and Cersei’s expected downfall.  He was going to partake in ousting her from her throne, and if he survived the battle, he’d likely have to live through her execution.  She deserved death – and he’d purposely separated himself from her, and took up opposition against her, when he’d left King’s Landing so long ago now.

But still – future memories of his former lover and sister’s head on a pike, somewhere on a wall in the City – his feelings about this were not to be given consideration in the light of day.  He shoved them all away into the murkiest corner of his soul.  Despite that, he could sometimes see Tyrion eyeing him, and on occasion Brienne would lay her large hard hand on his arm for no reason that he could see.  So while he couldn’t speak of it, they knew, and that was enough for him.  Best to focus on the need to somehow, if possible, win Brienne’s father’s approval.  Or at least tolerance.

When their party had all arrived at Evenfall Hall, Sansa and Tyrion having come along to finalize Tarth’s new place as an ally to the North, the Evenstar had strode into the courtyard to greet them even as they were shaking the snow from their cloaks.  Before greeting Lady Sansa, Lord Tyrion, or any of the other arguably important people standing there, he’d gone to his daughter.  Jaime watched as he enfolded Brienne in his arms.  He was a large man who once, Jaime could tell, had been bronzed from island sun.  Even after all this time without that light, his skin was leathered and dark. 

Brienne glowed.  Jaime swallowed.  No matter how he was received, he was glad to have seen that expression on her face – lips uptilted, skin crinkling around her eyes and nose, crooked teeth fully displayed in her gladness.  The hug didn’t last long – Lord Tarth soon turned to Jaime, catching him sporting the vestiges of a smile elicited by Brienne’s happiness.  The other man paced the two steps needed to reach Jaime and put his hand out. 

Jaime offered his, measuredly; the Evenstar grasped it firmly in both of his. So that was that – his concerns in this aspect, at least, seemed to have been for naught. 

Now, here in the room that Brienne told him had been hers as she was growing up, Jaime felt – strange.  He’d been, truth be told, braced for more tests of his worthiness.  Lord Selwyn had done none of that.  Jaime felt as though he’d been all garbed up for war, battle-fever already making his blood race heat through his body, al to just be abruptly informed that peace had been declared.  There was no fight to be had, yet, until the one that he was dreading in that back corner of his soul.

“You were right”, he sighed, drying off before turning to his own clothing. Brienne watched his movements from across the room, her face calm, her eyes with a soft smug look to them.  It made him laugh and was a welcome distraction.  “I should have know.  You are a singular woman, Brienne – only a singular parent could have produced you.” Wrapping a soft belt securely about the waist of his gown, he paced through the space between them, wanting there to be none.  He stopped only when his torso was against hers and her arms were coming about his chest.  Anchoring his hands at the back of her waist, he tilted his head back to be able to look into her face. 

“Yes,” she agreed placidly, her eyes glinting down at him.  “From here on, just listen to me.  It will go better for you if you do.”

He laughed again, and so did she, and he was compelled to kiss her while murmuring, "wench".  The kissing, of course, led to other activities.  Later, in Brienne’s bed, Jaime lay with his head on her chest while she stared up at the ceiling and laughed some more.

“What is it?” he wondered, in the sleepy haze induced from the culmination of their recent vigorous actions. 

She chuckled again.  “This is something I truly never imagined doing in this room.”  
  
“No?” Jaime had to grin. “And how is it, then?”

“Strange.” 

Jaime snorted. 

Brienne moved a hand to cradle the back of his head as she mused.  “Funny.”

He lifted his head from her breast to cast her a disgruntled look. She chuckled, and petted his hair. 

“Lovely,” she sighed.

“All right then.”  Appeased, he returned his head to its place on her chest.

 

They did their part in the extended barricade around King’s Landing, and when it fell Jaime was thankful for Jon's or Daenerys's foresight in placing him and Brienne in units from Tarth that were assigned other parts of the city than the Red Keep.  The taking of the castle was far easier than it should have been, had circumstances been different. But even this far south, the sun was gone.  Life was night.  It was difficult, especially for those remaining of older generations and for these arguably softer Southerners, to adapt.  For people of power there were more options, but most of the city's people were painfully making do with what they had and that was increasingly little.  At King’s Landing as in the North, people were dying of freezing, of diseases brought on by malnourishment and crowded conditions, and of despair – once it set into people’s psyches that the sun might truly not be seen again for generations, suicides became common.  The people just did not put up much of a fight, when Jon's and Daenerys's army came to call.

None of these deprivations, of heat, of sustenance, or of hope, were Queen Cersei's cause of death. Nor was, as it happened, any Northern soldier.  That was her own people, in the form of the younger brother of a maid Cersei, increasingly unhinged, had abused literally to death. The tale Tyrion heard and then conveyed to Jaime was that as the Keep fell into chaos with an army coming through its gates, the grief-stricken boy had made his way through clogged servant’s halls and into the chamber where the women were being housed.  The story went that, exhausted from stress and wine, Cersei had been just rousing from a nap to the urgent news that the Northern army was pouring in to the Keep.  The boy was known to the other women in the room, and no one took special note of him until he was at the Queen’s side.  His assassination was clumsy and unskilled - he drove a kitchen knife into her chest, and then as she was struggling to breath he managed to slit her throat in a ragged gash that nevertheless did the job.  He then ran past the screaming women and the guards (likely distracted by the enemy literally at their gates) who were responding to the screams, back into the servant hallways, and was hustled out of the Keep by someone – who changed with the teller of the story.  The starving people by that point hated the Queen so strongly that they took measures to protect the young man from being executed. They hid him and secreted him out of the war-torn city and away somewhere. At least, so the story went.

King’s Landing fell fully to the Northern forces, and no one bothered to even hunt the boy down.

 

So their sister’s death happened at a remove from Jaime and from Tyrion.  When the Keep was fully in Wolf and Dragon hands, Jon and Daenerys called upon the brothers to view their sister’s body.  They wanted positive identification – no passing another woman’s body off as the queen’s.  And someone needed to light the fire.  There would be no pike after all, no risky body parts left anywhere. No one else in the city, from the highest septon to the lowest chambermaid, wanted to do this deed for Cersei which had been for so many honorable, honest fighters – lighting her funeral pyre.  But it had to be done.

Tyrion expressed quietly that although he didn’t want to see the body, he thought that he needed to.  Jaime looked down at him as he said this, and after a moment of looking into Tyrion’s gaze he said that he would accompany him.

They went, the two men did with their women; not to the throne room, no, Cersei was not laid out in state – but to a small stone coldroom temporarily given over to hold her and safely encase her flames. Guards were posted at the door.  As they halted outside it, Sansa brushed her fingers over Tyrion’s sleeve. 

“Shall I come in, or remain out here?” she asked.  Tyrion glanced at the door, and squared his shoulders.

“Stay here, I think,” he murmured, and Sansa nodded.  Brienne looked the same question to Jaime, and he wordlessly cocked his head to motion her to stay with Sansa.  His face was white, but his jaw was set.  Brienne nodded. So the brothers went in together and otherwise unaccompanied.

Neither of the women spoke while they waited for Brienne’s husband and Sansa’s … lord?  Brienne wasn’t sure what label to give Tyrion’s part of that relationship, being they were as yet unmarried. She gazed over Sansa’s head at the wall, and Sansa mostly stared at the floor.  Between them the moments stretched, but they were very few before the wooden door creaked back open.  The scent and sound of flames wafted out.  Sansa went immediately to Tyrion, covering his hands with both of hers despite being in full view of the guards.  Brienne just watched Jaime’s face, taking in the tightness of his jaw and the dryness of his eyes.  He moved to her side and they walked, away from the room with its glimpse of fire through its open door and the guards who would make certain it stayed contained.

Once they parted from Tyrion and Sansa and were around a corner into an empty stretch of corridor Brienne slid her hand into the crook of Jaime’s elbow and pulled him to a stop.  He just stood, looking first down at the floor and then sideways at her, a half-defiant half-lost look on his face.

She had no words that could be of any possible help for this.  But if he’d let her, she could hold him.  Though it seemed too small a gesture for the moment, it was all she had.  She let her fingers slide to his shoulders, watched his face, ready to back off at the first sign of resistance.  But he stared at her, his eyes straining out of his hard face with something akin to desperation.  So she bracketed his stiff body with her arms and encased him with herself. He stood still, arms at his sides, and did nothing except fail to move away from her.  She understood that he had nothing with which to reciprocate right now, and that was all right.  She held him in the cold corridor, wanting to warm his body and his heart if she could.  He did not tremble.  He did not move.  It was like embracing a plank of wood. She carried on embracing, leaving it to Jaime to end it when he would.

It was several minutes, Brienne thought, before he took a deep breath in and let out a long, quiet sigh.  It ruffled through her hair at her ear as he tilted his head in to rest it against her shoulder.  She tightened her grasp of him, and finally Jaime bent his arms up to encircle her waist.  He leaned into and against her, taking her strength and letting it hold him up. She gave it, glad that she could and glad that he accepted it. 

They didn’t speak, standing there in the dim hallway or when they finally resumed walking though it.  But Brienne kept glancing down at him, checking on him, and Jaime would look up and meet her somber gaze.  Eventually he slanted his chin up at her, and reached for her arm with his left hand and drew hers through his elbow.  And they went up to a hastily convening Council meeting, entwined that way.


	27. Carrying on Living

Jaime and Brienne made their home at Casterly Rock, it having been decided the Lannister name and holdings would continue.  Sansa was not best pleased to let Brienne go, but there needed to be someone in place there to help hold Westeros for Jon and Daenerys’s joint rule from King’s Landing. She and Tyrion returned North and made their home at Winterfell.   The Golden Company left the continent. Westeros settled into the new state of things.  There had been war for so long, peace was almost as much of an adjustment as the loss of light was.   
  
Time was a more nebulous concept than it had once been, even with the timekeeping devices that were invented here and there.  The pace of living was more slow and yet more desperate.  The feel and sight of sunlight became a distant memory. Once precautions against freezing became second nature so that deaths from cold levelled off, suicide and starvation seemed to be killing at even paces.  But eventually the suicide deaths also plateaued; the people who were susceptible to extreme emotional lows influenced by the lack of light were eventually, mostly, gone. 

Of those who did die, no one was ever buried.  Funerals always involved pyres.  The Night King might be gone, but the horrors of the Others were too imprinted on Westeros’s collective memory for anyone to risk doing elsewise.

Intertwined with death though it was, life did go on - altered in many ways, but still life. Over the course of that year, there were marriages. Sansa and Tyrion married, with as much pomp as could be mustered and as many people present as could make the trip. Occasionally there were births amongst the people. Sansa worried about them, the children, born into a world without enough - not enough warmth, sustenance, or hydration, and no light but that of fire or magic. She and Tyrion had chosen to try to hold off on child-rearing. Some of that was Tyrion's fear, relating to his own mother's death in birthing him.  Some of it was in hopes that the further in time they were from the Night King’s defeat the more chance there might be of the sun returning. But the winter and the dark pushed on, and on.

Time stretched, with most human effort from commoner to lord focused on finding ways to survive.  It was a year and more before Jaime and Tyrion saw each other again, when Jaime and Brienne made the arduous and dangerous journey north for a conclave of houses regarding pooling of ever-dwindling resources.  Long discussions, arguments, even the occasional scuffle consumed much of their time.  But there was also space for reconnecting and reviewing life as it had been and as it now was.

  
They discussed this and more, the brothers did, one night with ale on the table between them. All of the wine was long gone. They were in the Great Hall after that wake period’s last meal, most of which were communal now.  People just wanted to be together, to try to meet some need to connect and ascertain that they weren’t alone in the dark and the cold.  It grew late, and most had left by now. Their wives in fact were elsewhere, Brienne tending to a task in the armory and Sansa engaged in monitoring their carefully managed stores.   
  
Jaime curled his fist around his mug as he and Tyrion gazed across the room. He had been happy at Tyrion and Sansa's wedding, seeing his brother’s hope for the love that finally seemed to be within reach. Viewing his brother and his wife together now during his and Brienne's visit Jaime had been gratified and relieved at the clear care and respect, even trust, that was evident between Sansa and Tyrion. 

In the last few hours Tyrion had expressed his opinion on everything from the way the caches of wildfire about King’s Landing had been disposed of to the way Pod had taken up with one of Winter Town’s single women – the widow of a tanner, if Jaime understood correctly, and enough older than Pod that it was causing some titillated speculation among those who were amused by such things.  From there the brothers’ discussion had turned to family. Tyrion had delicately enquired about the possibility of nephews or nieces for himself.  Jaime had shaken his head; he and Brienne hadn’t been taking any special precautions, but pregnancy just hadn’t happened.  Brienne’s courses were very infrequent and uncomfortable when they came, and the Maester had said this could make it difficult to conceive.  Brienne always got a bit of a defiant look on her face when people raised the question of children and her lifestyle; the septa at Casterly Rock had intimated more than once that she thought Brienne’s ‘unwomanly’ level of physical activity was the issue.  Jaime, for the most part, shrugged that kind of talk off.  He’d had three children, and lost them all.  He had Brienne – if they were childless the rest of their lives, he still had her.   

“Might be we can’t have children,” he acknowledged to his brother. 

Tyrion gauged Jaime’s open expression and lack of tension and nodded slowly. “You’re all right with it, if that’s the case,” he observed, and Jaime nodded firmly.  Tyrion’s expression lightened as if in relief, and he took a swallow of ale.  “Might make the succession messy,” he continued laconically. 

Jaime shrugged.  “Brienne’s her father’s only surviving child, so if it comes to that it’ll be one of yours in line for it, if you ever get on with your own child-making.”

Tyrion sighed.  “A mess indeed, at some point – the succession of Tarth, Lannister, and Stark all so closely intertwined.  I’ll give it thought.”

Ever good at the Game, Tyrion had been.  It seemed he couldn’t quite turn that off.  But for tonight, he seemed willing enough to move on from that topic; he gazed around the room, then filled his cup and raised it to Jaime to elicit his half of a toast.  “To the women we’ve tied ourselves to.  May the Seven bless them, they’re each of them more than either of us deserve.”

Jaime wordlessly touched his cup to Tyrion’s and quaffed the toast, then set it back down on the table with a thump.  He wanted Brienne.  What was she doing that was taking so long?

"I always knew if I had to marry, I’d end up with a woman taller than me," Tyrion mused. “You, though?  That was … unexpected.”

Jaime couldn’t stop the upward curl of his lips.  “Amongst all your other verbal giftings, you’ve always have the one of understatement.” The fire at his back was warm, and the room was peaceable. There was nothing in this room that might rise up and try to fight him. But he had not yet, since that last battle for King’s Landing, been able to get his mind and body to come down from guard. He'd been fighting so long, in constant danger for so long, it seemed his mind had learned to never stop that watchfulness. Even amongst friends, even in sleep. 

In sleep too was that room where he and Tyrion had last seen their sister, full of flames and darkness. There was horror and anger, sadness and hatred there. In his dreams, his sister was joined by others - dead friends, slain enemies, murdered family, sometimes capricious gods and maleficent demons were there in the flames. 

Sometimes his sister _was_ the demon in the flames.

Those dreams, and the inability to stop expecting danger – they made real life not feel real, this world to which he'd returned. Sometimes he needed something to move and fight and do damage to him, accept damage from him, and there was no one suitable for that cause here.  There were veterans of the wars, yes, veterans everywhere some of whom were also still reliving the war over and over; but for none of them was that combined with the special hell that was his father and his sister and his kings, past and present, and his past actions.  And there were very few amongst them who was up to his mettle in a fight.  
  
But there was Brienne, who had lived through the same war he had and while knowing his worst still believed the best of him. Brienne, who was always there in the darkness with him, and making it not so dark. Sometimes they fought each other, because their minds and bodies had to. Sometimes they fucked each other, which was a separate thing from making love but somehow still a facet of it.  Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the fighting and the fucking. And they loved often.

Finally, as Jaime thought of Brienne, she appeared, entering the hall and ducking beneath a low-hanging decorative fir branch.  
  
"What do our respective spousal choices say about us?" Jaime murmured, not allowing his inner musings to show on his face as more than contemplation. It was half a jape, one which made Tyrion's lips curve. Sansa was here now, too, hailing Brienne with a small smile.  
  
"Something important, surely, but nothing that I can puzzle out tonight," his brother grunted. "Maybe tomorrow I can.”  He was staring too, across at their women, his brow furrowed.  “Sansa says that she listens for the sound of my voice, now.  That she finds it _soothing_.  That it has helped to heal her.”  When Tyrion looked at Jaime again, his face held bemusement.  “How is that?” he wondered aloud.  “How am I helping anyone to heal?  It’s incredible.”

  Jaime pressed his lips together, finding something of awe in himself, that his brother had found something so wonderful out of a history so terrible.

“Maybe tomorrow I’ll figure that one out, too.” Tyrion’s voice was definitely a little muzzled, from the alcohol.  “After some rest.”

Rest. Jaime was so tired, all the time. Again, something that Brienne understood.

But he was doing better than some. The previous day, one returned villager-cum-fighter had killed himself, driving his sword up into his own chest out in the snow. Others, he was told, had lost their wits to the darkness and had to be kept locked up for their own safety and that of others.  
  
Brienne came across the room to him, eventually. She looked down at the jug of ale that he and Tyrion had emptied but said nothing. She'd already had words with him about how often he was drunk. Harsh words, to which he'd listened. Most of what was in the jug had been consumed by Tyrion.  
  
Tyrion tipped his chin up to speak with Brienne.  
  
"I've not had a chance to tell you," he said, his voice a little furry but decipherable, "thank you."  
  
"Thank you?" Brienne's face was suspicious, but she sat down on the bench Jaime inhabited, near enough to him that he could feel the heat from her body. They should go upstairs, so he could feel it more directly.  
  
"Yes. For my brother."  
  
Jaime breathed in. He hadn't been expecting that.  
  
"Not needed," Brienne gruffed. She shifted awkwardly on the seat. He eyes flickered sideways to Jaime's.  
  
"Perhaps not," Tyrion wasn't letting it drop, Jaime realized ruefully. "But Jaime is important to me. And you saved his life a dozen times, and stood by him in truth, and … I think … maybe saved his soul.”

Jaime heard Brienne’s breath catch in her throat, and she was stirring to argue. She wouldn’t have liked that ‘saved his soul’ bit. Jaime moved his hand to her side, stroked his fingers down her back once, and she stilled.  Tyrion took note of this and graced it with a pause and slight smirk. Then continued.  “You  are still standing by him. As I asked."  
  
Which had not been and would continue to not be easy. Jaime expected he would never know how hard it likely still was, for Brienne, to sometimes still after everything be painted by the ignorant with the same brush as the Kingslayer and Child-Murderer she'd married.

But she was Brienne, and she did not care for others’ _talk_.  He smiled to himself: he could hear her saying it even if she didn’t say it this very moment.  
  
"I didn't do it for you," Brienne bit out. "And he saved me too," She grabbed Jaime's handless arm and pulling him to his feet. "Uncounted times. Good night, my lord."   
  
With a mock hapless shrug at Tyrion, who just laughed, Jaime let her tow him out and up stairs to their corridor. He knew what she wanted. He wanted the same.


	28. Looking East

Over the next half-year it seemed to some that the severity and frequency of the wind and snow storms decreased.  After a while, the Maesters were making tentative predictions that this Winter might not, after all, last an entire generation.  As it had already been nearly three years of winter, most who heard this were afraid to hope. But after a bit, it was noticeable to all that although the sun had not returned the weather was definitely easing. Travel became less dangerous, for those who had the physical reserves for treks. Sansa and Tyrion made occasional visits down to Casterly Rock.

Brienne and Jaime returned these visits, and on one of them Brienne was sitting with Sansa and some of her ladies when Sansa’s maid scurried in, her thin face excited.  
  
"My lady!" She exclaimed as soon as Sansa acknowledged her. "There's word from amongst the crofters near Widow’s Watch that the eastern sky has been – has been _brightening_ , briefly, beginning last week."  
  
Hope clenched a fist around Sansa's chest for a moment. "Did anyone else along the eastern coast see it?" she asked over a gasp from the woman beside her and a refuting grumble from the next lady over.

The maid dipped her head, and her tone. "I don't know.  The Maester has sent ravens to ask."  
  
Other east coast cities, it was soon reported, did have reports of a lightening sky. Excitement rushed through Winterfell and WinterTown, accompanied by a healthy dash of pessimism and sarcasm.

The following cycle after those reports came in, just before the approximate time the light was claimed to have been seen, Sansa, Tyrion, Brienne, and Jaime were grouped onto a parapet facing east. Further down along the wall, as well as below in the courtyard and beyond the gates, people by the dozens and hundreds were doing the same, looking for the light they had lost too long ago.   
  
Sansa saw Brienne put a hand on the stone wall almost caressingly, and throw a complex look at Jaime. He stepped into Brienne's side. "I remember," Sansa heard him say. She wondered, but whatever memory they were sharing seemed a good one, for Brienne gave a smile that was soft and deep.  
  
Sansa gripped Tyrion's hand as they all searched the horizon, straining their eyes for any hint of change to its hue. For what seemed like a long length of time, there was nothing. Then Sansa frowned. "I think," she ventured, then stopped.  
  
"What, my lady?" Tyrion prompted. "You've the youngest eyes of any of us."  
  
Sansa paused, then said, a shocked ebullience in her tone, "I think I DO see it!"  
  
Jaime leaned forward over the stone wall, eagerly, as if he could somehow get closer to the sight to see it better. Brienne grabbed his arm with short laugh. "Don't go over!" she exclaimed. But they were all doing it, crowding the wall, anxiously looking. Finally, Brienne nodded. "Yes," she said. "Now it's fading, but it was there. There was light!"  
  
Sansa sank down onto her knees, heedless of her skirts. Tyrion, next to her, had his hand to his open mouth.  
  
"I had not dared to hope," Jaime breathed, although clearly he had, since he was here with them looking. He had not been able to see it, but he trusted the reactions of the others – clearly they had.  
  
In another week, no one could deny that the sun was THERE, just over the edge of the world. It became a daily ritual across the continent, the turning out of doors to watch the sky. Celebrations began, songs were written. There was a kind of joyous hope for their world that had never before been, not in anyone's memory.    
  
On the morning that the glowing edge of gold finally showed in a shy ring limning the eastern horizon, Tyrion and Sansa's firstborn was conceived. She entered the world 40 weeks later, to true days which had grown to almost full length.  And then a full year later, to the shock of many, Jaime and Brienne had a child as well.  It was a boy, and they never had another after that.  They were still unsure as to why - it wasn’t for lack of trying! - but they were content with the bright-haired, stubborn, gentle-hearted son they were raising in the light. 

The snows stayed, and the cold stayed too; but both were milder versions of what had been when the Night King rampaged across the North.  Around the more-or-less unified continent, lives and hearts were turned finally to more than just survival.  More little ones were born, as more diverse crops were planted and grew; freezing and starvation were fended off. 

Children of Winter, these offspring certainly were, but they would grow up in the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter, folks! Thanks to those of you who hung with me to the end!


End file.
